Beauty is often regarded as a universal value, an objective quality that transcends time and place. Yet the criteria by which we judge whether something is beautiful are shaped by cultural conventions, historical circumstances and systems of power. What one culture reveres as beautiful, another may overlook.
Adam Lowe, director of Factum Arte — a multidisciplinary studio that produces works for artists including Anish Kapoor, Marina Abramović and Marc Quinn, among many others — and founder of Factum Foundation, internationally recognised for its pioneering work in cultural heritage preservation and the development of new techniques of rematerialisation, explores beauty as a cultural construction that shapes how we see, value, preserve and transmit material culture.
For centuries, Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana was considered one of the finest paintings in the Louvre. Today, it is largely overshadowed by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, with which it shares a room and whose iconic status owes as much to shifting cultural narratives, reproduction, the media and tourism as it does to any intrinsic quality of the painting itself. Caravaggio, too, fell into relative obscurity before his rediscovery in the twentieth century.
Through a series of specific case studies — from Factum Arte’s rematerialisation of The Wedding at Cana and its return to the painting’s original setting in the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, to the recent rediscovery of Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo in Spain — Lowe examines how the concept of beauty is constructed, transformed and transmitted over time.
A compelling subject for a conversation with the British Ambassador to Spain, Alex Ellis, moderated by Sol Costales, Director of Projects at Factum Arte.
Event in English with simultaneous interpretation into Spanish
