Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
What have the cluttered landscapes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder to do with the complex plots of Fyodor Dostoevsky? In each, we find subtle allusions to the holy, hidden and tucked away in the least likely of places. Bruegel and Dostoevsky "bury the lede," so to speak, and thereby implicate us in overlooking or dismissing the presence of the holy—until we stumble over it in double-take recognition, and that hidden detail proves axiomatic. In this lecture, I consider examples of this phenomenon in Bruegel's paintings and Dostoevsky's novels. Then, I consider why Bruegel and Dostoevsky employ these compositional strategies: Why is the hiding of the holy so urgent?