UCLA Department of Art History Colloquium with Susan Dackerman, May 6

Please join us for a Department of Art History Colloquium with featured speaker Susan Dackerman on Wednesday, May 6 at 1 PM in Dodd 275 for her talk, The Paleontology of Print: Lithographic Limestone and the Nature of Reproducibility. 

Summary: When in 1796, the Munich playwright Alois Senefelder developed a method of printing from the surface of the local Bavarian limestone, he was utilizing a material that had been reproducing indexical images for millions of years. The Jurassic-era limestone slabs were riddled with fossilized flora and fauna. The same year as Senefelder’s invention, from study of the same Bavarian limestone, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier recognized that some fossils in the stone were petrifications of species that were no longer extant, establishing the idea of extinction. Prior to Cuvier, fossils were imagined to be images made by Nature itself. Senefelder’s use of the local limestone was preceded by the stone’s use by regional sculptors such as Hans Daucher, who around 1500 turned from marble to the native limestone because the characteristics of the stone suited precision carving. Many of the fossil-laden stone sculptures subsequently were used as templates to cast bronze copies, conceptually replicating the stone’s capacity to cast fossils. Nearly 300 years later, the stone’s generative potential again was exploited to make printed multiples known as lithographs. My paper imagines how examining the history of early modern sculpture and prints alongside the history of paleontology enables us to see how Nature, and the contemporaneous historical theories that explicate it, have informed the work of artists, as well as shaped the history of print and replication.

All are welcome!