Maria José Goulão |
She holds a PhD in Art History (Univ. of Coimbra, 2005), and is a full-time professor of Art History at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. She lectured and held full courses at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra, at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, and at Doctorate Programs from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain) on South American Colonial Art, and “Cultural Heritages of Portuguese Influence” (III-UC, University of Coimbra). She also lectured at the Fine Arts Academy of Karlsruhe, at the École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence (ESAAix), and at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Verona.
She is a researcher at GEMA (Group of Multidisciplinary Studies in Art, CEAACP), and a member of the Portuguese Association of Art Historians, of ICOMOS, and of ICOM. She is the author of many published articles, diverse chapters and one book, on subjects from Medieval, Renaissance and South American Art. She has carried out extensive research on the circulation of artistic forms in the South Atlantic region during the colonial period (her PhD dissertation is entitled: "La puerta falsa de América" : Portuguese artistic influence in the Rio de la Plata region during the colonial period). For access to some of her publications, see: http://sigarra.up.pt/fbaup/pt/publs_pesquisa.querylist?p_codigo=243957 She participated in more than 60 scientific meetings in Portugal, Spain, France, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, and held lectures, conferences, free courses and summer courses in diverse institutions in Portugal, Brazil and Canada. She was the recipient of many grants (from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Portuguese government, the Luso-American Foundation and the Paul Getty Foundation - Getty Grant Program, among others), and she travelled extensively through the USA, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Ecuador for her research. She was a Visiting Scholar at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia, USA), and at the University of Texas at Austin (USA). |
representing the invisible:
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An apocalyptic landscape, hostile armies, villages on fire, recalling the fire that struck Bosch's hometown in 1463; a Flemish windmill; one knife (of the kind used in the fifteenth century to peel potatoes and also to cut off thieves' ears) forming a tremendous war machine of sexual connotations, coupled with a pair of ears. On top of this infernal vision - a 16th century copy from part of The Garden of Earthly Delights of the famous painter (Museo del Prado, Madrid) - the figures of Tondal and his guardian angel, on a journey in the afterworld, from where the young knight will return to tell the living what he saw in hell. This intriguing medieval moral tale put into images, that can be seen at an art collection in Porto, while not being "a Bosch", is a rarity in Europe and has deserved a marginal reference in the most recent studies of the work of Hieronymus Bosch and his followers. The painting allows us to cross text and image to understand this visio, which makes use of the rhetoric of dreams and their liminal nature, but which is also a figuration of the world of the dead - the privileged locus for the soul's journey - and, as such, an imaginary space, no less central in its function of "thinking the unthinkable" and of putting into practice the late medieval pedagogy of fear. |