.png)
About the L'Orange Lecture 2025
This lecture investigates how the senses are transposed into the language of the image. Through iconological case studies from the Middle Ages and the early modern era, it becomes evident how artists devised visual strategies to convey in images what words articulate—yet what often touches the inexpressible when translated into pictorial form.
At the center of this inquiry lies the story of Salome. Particular attention will be given to the visual strategies that frame the dynamics of contamination, overlap, inversion, corner, leverage, cut, and mise-en-abîme. These devices not only structure the image but also seek to conjure the fleeting moment of transformation itself. Salome thus emerges as the pivotal figure through which pictorial language reveals its power to sustain, suppress, or intensify symbolic archetypes—among them the female dance, mimetic violence, and the taboo of touch.
By interweaving the hermeneutics of exegesis and semiotics with insights from anthropology and iconology, this lecture pays homage to the breadth of the Humanities and to the enduring vitality of Art History—disciplines so profoundly championed by Hans Peter L’Orange.
About the Speaker
Barbara Baert is Professor in Medieval Art, Iconology and Historiography at the KU Leuven (Flanders, Belgium). Her work links questions from the history of ideas, cultural anthropology and philosophy, and is deeply sensitive to cultural archetypes and their symptoms in the visual arts.
.jpeg)
Prof. Baert is the recipient of several awards, including the prestigious Belgian Francqui Prize for Human Sciences in 2016. She held the Aby Warburg Professor at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg in 2023, where she completed a three-month residency. Barbara Baert directs the book series Art&Religion and Studies in Iconology (both Peeters Publishers).
Her recent monographs include The Gaze from Above: Reflections on Cosmic Eyes in Visual Culture (2021); Petrifying Gazes: Danaë and the Uncanny Space (2021); Looking Into the Rain: Magic-Moisture-Medium (2022); Sumpf Wassernixe by Paul Klee: A Feuilleton (2024) and Back to the Marshes: Myth, Method, Matter (A Memoir Almost) (2025).
Interested in Attending?
If you would like to attend, please register by the day before the lecture at: https://nettskjema.no/a/lorange.
About the L'Orange Lecture
Each year, a renowned international scholar delivers a lecture in memory of Hans Peter L'Orange, the founder of the Norwegian Institute in Rome. This lecture is open to the public. To learn more about previous lectures, please visit the overview on our website: The Annual L'Orange Lecture.