Emily Monty

Where did all the paintings go? Problems of Provenance and Display in an Eighteenth-Century Dutch Home

This talk will focus on the painting collection of the Fagel family, who were prominent in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Today, the family is best known for their extraordinary collection of over 30,000 volumes of books, pamphlets, and maps, now preserved at Trinity College Dublin. The talk presents an aspect of the project A Portal to the Fagel Collection. This project brings together art and architectural historians to study the Fagel art collection, which has been entirely dispersed, and the once-splendid home, whose structure remains largely intact. Under the direction of architectural historian Maria Elisa Navarro Morales and myself, students, researchers, and professional web developers are building a set of physical and digital models to understand how the library and painting gallery were structured and experienced by an international coterie of dignitaries and well-heeled travelers, including the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. These models are based on the books kept in the Fagel library, surveys of the site, archival plans and inventories, period descriptions, auction records, and comparative contexts. We are also creating a database to promote research on the collection and to power an augmented reality digital twin that will recontextualize the Fagel collections within the home. Our goal is to launch the digital twin in 2027 alongside a planned exhibition in The Hague of books from the Fagel library. As we begin to piece together the collection and understand its vast scale in this early stage of the project, a significant question has emerged: where did all the paintings go?

Rebecca Johnston 

Russian Culture Mobilized for War

Ever since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Russian government has attempted to operationalize its own domestic cultural sphere to facilitate military success. With a network of tens of thousands of state-dependent institutions at its disposal, Russia’s leadership has continually banked on its “cultural front” to achieve what weapons have not. This digital mapping project analyzes and visualizes the different ways that the state has attempted to weaponize culture over the course of the war and to what ends.

Registration encouraged.