Work in Progress - Visiting Fellows

David Stork (University College London): 'Computer-assisted connoisseurship: Rigorous tools for humanist studies of fine art paintings and drawings'

Recently, a small but growing number of scholars versed in computer science and art history have developed sophisticated algorithms as tools for humanist scholars addressing a wide range of problems in the history and interpretation of fine art paintings and drawings.  This short presentation will include examples such as computer-assisted analysis of pose in 11,000 Western portraits, lighting in works by Johannes Vermeer, inference of simple meanings from vanitas paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, and preliminary steps in the computational recovery of images of lost paintings.   

Mor Segev (University of South Florida): 'Joseph Ibn Kaspi’s Reading of Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Aristotle’s Ethics'

Joseph Ibn Kaspi (approx. 1280-1345) takes the biblical books traditionally attributed to King Solomon (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs) to be fully congruent with Aristotelian ethical theory. His commentaries on the biblical texts in question, as well as his reformulations, additions, and other choices in his epitome of Aristotle’s Ethics, reflect his commitment to that general interpretation, and his aspiration to establish it through philosophical argumentation. The result is an ambitious recasting of these texts, in the light of one another, and a set of fresh interpretations of key ideas in them, of interest to scholarship on both classical philosophy and the history of biblical exegesis. In my presentation, I will analyze instances illustrating Ibn Kaspi’s approach. I will also discuss the challenges posed by manuscript variants, which sometimes reflect significantly different ideological stances, as they have been emerging from my work editing and translating Ibn Kaspi’s texts.

The Work in Progress seminar explores the variety of subjects studied and researched at the Warburg Institute. Papers are given by invited international scholars, research fellows studying at the Institute, and third-year PhD students.

ATTENDANCE FREE ONLINE OR IN PERSON WITH ADVANCE BOOKING