Antoine Wiertz (1806–65) and the Quest for Modern Genius

• 19-21 C art history
• Museums, galleries & private collections
• Artists (incl. musicians)

Bram Van Oostveldt studied art and theatre studies at Ghent university and obtained in his PhD in 2005 on the influence of Diderot’s dramaturgy and theatre theory in the Austrian Netherlands. From 2007 until 2019 he was assistant and associate professor theatre studies at the University of Amsterdam. From 2013 until 2017 he was senior researcher in the ERC project Elevated Minds: The Sublime in the Public Arts in 17^th-century Paris and Amsterdam at Leiden University. Since 2019 he is professor of theatre history at Ghent University. He has published widely on 17^th -, 18^th – and 19^th performing arts in relation to the visual arts, including two monographs.

Stijn Bussels studied art and theatre studies at Ghent University where he received his PhD in 2005 on the use of rhetoric in the 1549 Entry of Philip II in Antwerp, published by Rodopi in 2012. From 2005 until 2010 he worked as postdoc in the NWO VICI-project Art, Agency and Living Presence in Leiden (PI Caroline van Eck). There he focused on ancient Roman writers dealing with the belief that images are alive. From 2011-2013 he worked as assistant professor theatre studies at Groningen University. From 2013 until 2018, he was PI of the ERC Starting Grant project Elevated Minds. The sublime in the public arts in seventeenth-century Paris and Amsterdam at Leiden University. In 2017 he was appointed as professor of art history before 1800 at Leiden University.

Caroline van Eck obtained her PhD in aesthetics at the University of Amsterdam in 1994. In 2016, she was appointed as Professor of Art History at Cambridge. Her main research interests are art and architectural history and theory of the eighteenth century; the relations between rhetoric and the arts; the anthropological and psychological aspects of the impact of art works; and processes of stylistic and cultural transfer considered from the perspective of the agency of artefacts. In 2014, she received the Prix Descartes-Huygens, awarded by the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in France and the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences; in 2015, she was made a Chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite, and in the same year she received the Grand Prix du Rayonnement de la Littérature et Culture Françaises, awarded by the Académie Française. In 2016, she received a honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel.