Itay Sapir: "The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: Seaports from Claude to Turner"

The pictorial representation of seaports has a long history prior to Turner’s works, which are the focus of the special exhibition Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time. One antecedent the artist explicitly refers to is the treatment of the theme by Claude Lorrain in the seventeenth century. This talk seeks to elucidate the deeper resonances — anthropological, historiographical, and philosophical — that both painters gave this ostensibly mundane subject.