New “Lesson[s] of a Bas Relief”
Event details
Join us for research seminars hosted by the Department of History of Art with a selection of visiting academics, alongside University of York researchers. All students and staff are very welcome.
Please contact Dr Ivan Knapp (ivan.knapp@york.ac.uk) if you have any questions.
You can view the full schedule for the semester here: History of Art Research Seminar Schedule Semester 2 2026
Abstract: In an essay from 1878, “Orpheus and Eurydice: The Lesson of a Bas Relief,” British art-writer and critic Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) commemorated the disquiet she experienced during a prolonged encounter with an antique relief. While Lee’s essay has aptly been read as a call to arms for what would become the author’s approach to physiological aesthetics, it likewise invites particular attunement to the art of relief. As Lee was far from the first to observe, if the opposition between painting and sculpture has been foundational for an understanding of art in the long European tradition, the theory, practice, and reception of relief sculpture muddied any such clean distinctions, operating in the interval between the pictorial and the plastic. By the early decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, relief had come to stand emphatically and quite spectacularly as a privileged form of antique art making available for contemporary scrutiny, eminently worthy of emulation and the focus of considerable artistic, art historical, and archaeological study. Taking off from Lee’s relief preoccupations, this lecture considers the art-theoretical and philosophical stakes of relief in the long nineteenth century. How should we conceive of the distinctive affordances offered by this unruly, liminal, art form? And how might centering relief offer new lessons for writing a history of art?
Image: Christen Købke, Parti af afstøbningssamlingerne på Charlottenborg (Part of the Cast Collections at Charlottenborg), 1830; oil on canvas, 41.5 x 36 cms. Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen, inv. 253.
Professor Sarah Betzer
Sarah Betzer is Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia, where she has recently completed a term as Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities. She is spending the 2025-26 academic year as a Visiting Fellow at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the intersections of art theoretical debates and artistic process; the enduring power of the classical past; and the dynamics of gendered and sexed bodies in representation. She is the author of Animating the Antique: Sculptural Encounter in the Age of Aesthetic Theory (Penn State University Press, 2021) and Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History (Penn State University Press, 2012).