10 February, 6:00pm, Dr Jessica Barker, Anachronic Empire: The Afterlives of the Padrões of Diogo Cão

Abstract : This lecture explores the afterlives of the padrões of Diogo Cão (monumental stone columns erected on the coast of west Africa by Portuguese navigators in the 1480s)—involving iconoclasm, reproduction, repatriation and exhibition. I will argue that the padrões were a means by which the past was put in the service of the legitimacy and perceived durability of later colonial regimes, a buttressing of imperial authority performed via the display of originals in European museums and reproductions in the west African landscape.

About the speaker:

Jessica Barker is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art at The Courtauld Institute. She is a specialist in medieval art, with a particular emphasis on sculpture. She studied at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she was subsequently Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined The Courtauld in 2018, after two years as a lecturer in world art at the University of East Anglia.

Jessica’s research ranges across northern Europe and the Iberian peninsula, addressing questions of the macabre, gender, materiality and the body. Her prize-winning monograph, Stone Fidelity: Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture, explores the intersection of love and death in funerary art. She has published widely on death and commemoration, with articles in journals including Art Bulletin, Art History, The Burlington Magazine, Gesta, and The Sculpture Journal.

Her current projects include co-curating an exhibition exploring measurement and regulation in medieval and contemporary art, entitled Living by the Rule: Medieval meets Contemporary, which will open at the Sainsbury Centre in 2026. This talk relates to an ongoing research project focussed on the lives and afterlives of the padrões of Diogo Cão, thinking in particular about their nineteenth and twentieth century reproductions.

The seminar is organized by the ARTES Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group and the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art.

To join the lecture, please click on the Zoom link below (or copy and paste into your browser:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82033416779?pwd=CNoGaKgCOTecuCCqKuseo1smALYbAh.1

Meeting ID: 820 3341 6779

Passcode: 395803