Dr Christina Faraday

Christina Faraday is a historian of art and ideas, with a particular interest in how images and objects communicate. She specialises in the history and culture of Tudor and late-medieval Britain. She is a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she is working on a new history of Tudor art, and a project on Elizabethan art and music. Christina is a BBC New Generation Thinker 2019, a scheme that gives scholars the opportunity to share their work with wider audiences on BBC Radio.

About the event

In Tudor England, artworks were often described as ‘lively’. Contemporaries used this word about everything from tapestries to paintings, woodcuts to household objects. What did this mean in a culture where naturalism and single point perspective were alien concepts? And in a time of religious upheaval, when the misuse of images might lure the soul to hell, how could liveliness be a good thing?

In this talk Christina Faraday offers an overview of her latest book. Tudor Liveliness explores a hitherto neglected aspect of Tudor art, re-enlivening the period’s vivid visual and material culture and discovering how artists were able to: make absent things present; render the invisible, visible; and make the dead live.

Ticekts: Tudor Liveliness? Discovering Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England