Perpetual Contemporaneity. Reflections on time, crisis and survival in art history

With their analyses of a broad corpus of works, ranging from ancient sculpture to cinema, from the silence of the heavens to the voice of Edgar Wind, these lectures address some of the burning issues touched upon in recent discussions about the visual arts, such as temporality, anachronism, influence, crisis, the sacred and survival. The idea is to look once again at two foundational questions in art history as an academic discipline: the survival of the classical legacy and the construction of modernity. A critical reconsideration of these two large topics is especially relevant at this time, with the current crisis in the European project, and in the context of the institution that houses Picasso's Guernica, on the 30 anniversary of its arrival in Spain. This work can be considered a theoretical object that captures the essence of this symposium, which incorporates the history of art, from medieval miniatures to documentary film, to build a visual manifesto about the crisis of the present, the survival of the past and the project of modernity.