Lecture: Katie Scott — Drawing and the Early Modern City
Art historian Katie Scott examines how drawing shaped and responded to urban life in early modern France, in a free lecture at the Morgan Library.
Why we picked this
Scott is a Thaw Senior Fellow at the Morgan, currently completing research on how drawing emerged as a discipline in early modern France and its relationship to the changing city. She brings a genuinely original scholarly argument to what is otherwise often a purely aesthetic subject.
Katie Scott is a FBA Professor Emerita in the History of Art at The Courtauld Institute and a Thaw Senior Fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum, where she has been researching the relationship between drawing as an artistic discipline and the development of early modern French cities. Her work examines how drawings functioned not merely as preparatory sketches but as a way of thinking through — and about — urban space.
The lecture takes place in the context of the Morgan’s rich holdings in early modern drawings, making this a case where the scholar’s argument can be tested against actual objects. Scott will discuss the emergence of drawing as a distinct practice in early modern France and what that emergence tells us about how people began to represent, plan, and imagine the city as a formal subject.
Registration is required. The lecture is free; doors open thirty minutes before the 6 PM start and seating is first-come, first-served.