“Such a sweet faced youth”
Lunchtime Talk about John the Evangelist by Henrike Lähnemann
Location: Hatton Gallery
Time/Date: 30th January 2013, 12:10 - 13:00
“Such a sweet faced youth”. Images of John the Evangelist in the ‘Framing Icons’ exhibition
John the Evangelist has always been a bit of an eye-catcher in paintings, even before Dan Brown suspected the figure next to Jesus in Leonardo’s Last Supper to be a woman in disguise. Such misconceptions arise from a lack of iconographical knowledge about the background of “the apostle whom Jesus loved”. The ‘Framing Icons’ exhibition offers an excellent opportunity to revisit how John is portrayed in different eras and regional schools of paintings since it shows four striking representations of the figure. The talk in front of these painting will take a tour de force through the literary and visual representations of this figure that has been seminal for Western art.
Henrike Lähnemann is Professor of German Studies at the School of Modern Languages. Her research specialism is medieval literature and culture with a focus on text-image-relationship. She is working at the moment on a paper about representations of the apostles in devotional manuscripts from the convent of Medingen (near Lüneburg).
Published: 11th December 2012