For its 10th anniversary, the three-day Art History Festival at the Château de Fontainebleau is focusing on pleasure—a breath of fresh air as instructive as it is enjoyable. Scientific director Veerle Thielemans sat down to talk to us.
Each year, the festival deals with a universal subject such as dreams, nature, madness, laughter, etc. This year’s theme is pleasure. Why? Because it’s key to our relationship with art: the pleasure we feel looking at objects and images and the pleasure artists take in making them. Moreover, whatever the times, the iconography of sensory pleasures is extremely rich. Art historians have always been interested in interpreting it by focusing on the depiction of feelings and the gestures associated with them. The theme of the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste—leads us to address aesthetic, social, political and other kinds of questions without, however, overlooking those raised by contemporary gender studies on the male and female gaze. What place could be more appropriate for this than the Château de Fontainebleau, whose gardens, decoration, furnishings and architecture embody the pleasures of the Court?
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