Professor Georges Farhat will be participating in the upcoming international conference Dalla pittura al giardino: Transferts artistici dall’Antichità ai nostri giorni in Rome, Villa Medici, March 17-19, 2011.

Farhat will be presenting his paper: L'optique de "pourtraiture" au jardin en France (v. 1550-v.1700) - transferts, médiations et retours, du corpus vitruvien aux querelles de l'Académie

Painting and gardens have developed diverse relationships in 17th century France. Understanding these relationships, at different times in history, has been a critical issue for the historiography of gardens and, consequently, landscape epistemology, as 20th c. scholarly literature on the topic has clearly shown.
This issue will be addressed here in a new approach, through the prism of the fundamental links, at once structural and ambivalent, existing in perspective: between optics and representation, visual experience and physical reality, the spatialization of geometry and the projection plane. The complexity of this relationship can precisely be investigated in the polymorphic corpus of anamorphosis to which, as it proves, landscape architecture offered a place of tremendous invention.

Poster [PDF]