February 25, 2015

The Hegelianized Calvin:
Re-Examining Calvin’s Place in the Separation of Art from Religion

by Dr. Rebekah Smick. Associate Professor of Philosophy of the Arts and Culture
Institute for Christian Studies in the Toronto School of Theology. BA (Brandeis University). MA (Columbia University). PhD (University of Toronto)

Rebekah Smick specializes in pre-Kantian art theory and criticism, in particular the relation of early modern visual arts theory to poetics and rhetoric in the Western tradition. Her research and teaching investigate the aesthetic values of beauty and grace in the early modern period, the link between knowledge and imagination, the aesthetic function of metaphor, and the place of compassion. She is especially interested in delineating the connections made during the early modern period between aesthetics, metaphysics, ethics, and theology. She is author of Antiquity and Its Interpreters (Cambridge UP, 2000) and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà as Image in the Theology and Aesthetics of Compassion.