Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities, Art and Culture, History, Antiquity. Curator at Kunstmuseum Den Haag/Assistant professor sensory history Vrije Universiteit/author at Atlas Contact/Tedx-speaker, Amsterdam
Presentation:
On the nose – on changing beauty ideals
We seem to have very fixed standards for beauty – especially for women – when it comes to noses. Currently they should have a hollow bridge and upturned nasal tip, but most of all they shouldn’t be too big in size but rather petite. But this wasn’t always the case and seems to have emerged only at the beginning of the 20th century. Up until the 19th century many portrayed noses were exaggerated in size and shape. This has to do with the lost pseudo-science of ‘physiognomy’ and more specifically ‘nasology’. Many people believed that the shape and size of the nose were an expression of character and talent following the adagium ‘the bigger the better’. Cleopatra’s famous nose wasn’t fashioned after her actual features, but simply reflected the nose of a leader with political insight. And Darwin almost wasn’t allowed access to the Beagle because the captain didn’t think his nose expressed enough perseverance. Through historical examples and storylines the audience will learn more about what the ‘ideal’ nose looked like in the past and most of all, what certain shapes meant. They might never look at noses in the same way again.
CV:
Dr. Caro Verbeek is an art historian, author and maker specialized in the senses, combining curatorship and an academic career. She is known for her embodied and out-of-the-box approaches and is often referred to by others as an ‘artistic scholar’. She was formerly affiliated as a researcher and curator to the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and now works for Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
Verbeek is an education innovator both in museums, art academies and universities, having developed several hands-on, nose-on courses including ‘The Other Senses’ (KABK), ‘The Multisensory Gaze (Rijksmuseum), ‘Knowing by Sensing’ (VU) and ‘Big Questions in the Senses’. Over the past twenty years she has reconstructed numerous historical scents together with perfumers, such as the battle of Waterloo (with IFF) and the embalming of William of Orange. She contributed to the pan-European project Odeuropa on European smell heritage. In her ‘spare time’ she is also an assistant professor of sensory history and skills at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. And finally, she authored ‘On the Nose- A Brief Cultural History’ which was translated to several languages including Italian, Japanese and Mandarin.
Post:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/craniofacial-reconstructions-conference/