The Tessin Lecture
Lecture by Katie Scott
4.11 2014
Stockholm
Welcome to a lecture by Katie Scott, PhD, The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Date: 4 November 2014
Time: at 16.00
Place: In the Cinema
Language: English
Price: free admission
Interior Fictions: Dressing-gowns and Shipwrecks in Diderot’s “Regrets”
The lecture’s subject is an amusing short story written by the eighteenth-century French philosophe Denis Diderot in which he describes the transformation of his writing room or cabinet from modest redoubt to luxury study in the wake of the gift of a new dressing-gown. The lecture explores the themes of human folly and responsibility as they were addressed by the interior, its furnishings and decoration. It asks what kind of a space was the room of a man of letters ideally in the eighteenth century? Was pleasure always denied him in his public function, or could it be made compatible with truth and virtue?