Murray Seminar: ‘The artist’s new body, burle, and the praise of caricature in early modern Italy’, with Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Birkbeck, 20 October 2025, 17:00-18:30 (GMT)

20 October 2025, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, Keynes Library and Online, 17:00 — 18:30 GMT

Please join Birkbeck on 20 October, at Birkbeck and online, for the first Murray Seminar of this academic year. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius will share her research on ‘The artist’s new body, burle, and the praise of caricature in early modern Italy’.

If modernity placed caricature in the public sphere, linking it with insult and politics, caricatura, at the time of its emergence as an art form in early modern Italy, had been confined to a close milieu of artists’ workshops. It was treated as a drawing exercise or a practical joke (burla) among the company of students and friends. Even so, it attracted a host of 17th-century art writers and poets, from Mancini to Bellori, Baldinucci, and Malvasia. This seminar will re-examine the drawing representing a group of the former students of the Carracci watching a mountebank show. I will juxtapose the visual claim of the drawing itself, in which caricature serves as a tool of artists’ self-fashioning, turning their bodies into the locus of identity while ignoring any signifiers of social status, to the textual sources that ponder on caricature’s puzzling ability to procure likeness through deformation, as well as associate it with performance, banter and camaraderie.

Dr Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius was Curator and Deputy Director of The National Museum in Warsaw, taught art history at Birkbeck College, University of London and at the Humboldt University Berlin. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck School of Historical Studies. Her publications include Borders in Art: Revisiting Kunstgeographie (Polish Academy 2000); National Museum in Warsaw Guide: Galleries and Study Collections (National Museum in Warsaw 2001); Kantor was Here: Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain (Black Dog 2011, with Natalia Zarzecka), From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (Ashgate 2015, with Piotr Piotrowski); Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to the Communist Bloc (Routledge 2021). Her current research is on the historiography of caricature.

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