On December 18, 8:30am - 10:00am CET, to be precise, at In de Ruimte, Oudegracht 230A a/d werf, Utrecht, 3511 NT, Carel Huydecoper will talk to us about TIME. Grab a seat and let him take you on a fascinating time travel experience and help you see things from new, fresh perspectives. All is relative, after all… including of course, time!

Who is Carel?
Carel Huydecoper talks about art. He studied Art History and Iconology in Utrecht and after working for several museums started his own company: Lokroep Art.

He offers a different perspective on the history we already know. He combines his knowledge with wit and humour and entertains his audiences with stories, often during historically themed dinners his company organizes.

The theme this month is TIME so he will talk about historical time. How time has been viewed throughout the ages. Oddly enough, time has not been a constant through history. In its own peculiar way, time is relative. Calendars have changed but so has our understanding of time - and all of this is reflected in art.
Carel is also the house art historian of Paushuize and its collection here in Utrecht.

How would you describe the work you do?
My field is the history of art, and in particular Iconology. This is, by the way, not the study of icons but has more to do with the psychology of perception and with symbolism in art. This field is on the one hand very interesting while on the other it is completely useless. No one will ever shout: “quick we need an iconologist!” unless they are in a story by best-selling author Dan Brown.

The interesting part of my field is that so much of it is made out of stories. These are the biographies of artists, their clients and of course their subjects. Art deals with issues that are important to us; life, death, love, loss to name but a few. Good art shows us ways of dealing with our world through the stories it portrays and the way it portrays them.  

It helps that many of these stories are entertaining, funny even. Through telling these stories I like to teach people a way to enjoy art. Ultimately I hope to use stories and art to help people look at their own world through new eyes.

What led you to do this kind of work?
When I started in university I found that storytelling was a great way to make a living. whenever I was short on cash, which was most of the time, I would guide groups of people through Rome, Athens, Istanbul or whatever beautiful city in Europe. We have so many of them.

I also worked in Museum Speelklok here in Utrecht, first as a guide, later as a curator. Caring for delicate artwork is one of the few things I was actually trained to do but I must admit it is not for me. I am much more interested in sharing the stories behind the objects. That is what makes them come alive.

Often it seems we are required to  appreciate famous works of art. The Mona Lisa is as good an example as any. So many people are disappointed when they see it in the Louvre. It is a brilliant painting, and I love to tell people why this is so, but I choose to do so while also telling you about Leonardo da Vinci. History focuses on the successful, and Da Vinci was definitely one of those, yet the majority of his projects failed. Even his most famous works clearly show us where he went disastrously wrong. Museums tend not to tell you about these things, but to me part of his genius was that he continued to try new things throughout his life in spite of the risks. Did you know Da Vinci was also known as a performer? He played the lute and at parties he would play and improvise lyrics on the guests. Many  of his contemporaries commented on his ready wit, his friendliness, generosity and  his willingness to help younger artists. It is details like these that make him more human and can help to make his work more accessible.  

What is the role of time in art history?
For reasons no one yet fully understands there seems to be a familiar relationship between objects made in a certain period. With only a limited knowledge of art and history you can start to place paintings in a general region and period. It is not that difficult to see a painting for the first time and place it for instance in the 15th century Northern Europe. 

This shows us that there is a relationship between artists who never met and might never even have seen each other’s work. In part this can be explained by the fact that artists within the same period and region had similar materials and techniques available to them, but there is more to it. Probably in any culture or society there is a web of social and cultural links and unseen connections. 

Many of those will not even be obvious to people in those cultures and most are probably impossible to uncover from the distance history creates. Still for many works it is obvious they could not have been made in a different time than they were.

The ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel is a perfect example. It took a very peculiar set of circumstances to get the world’s most famous sculptor stuck doing a painting in an obscure chapel against his will. He was forced to do it by a pope who might not have been able to read, and who was much more interested in fashion and his own fame than in theology. It also took a large series of new inventions in art, made over the previous decades, that could all be incorporated in such an unlikely project by such an unlikely artist. 

So the Sixtine Chapel’s ceiling is a work that is very definitely fixed in its time but on the other hand is timeless. It is timeless because it has so long been admired and emulated. Ideas tried by Michelangelo on that ceiling for the first time have been copied so often it makes him the most influential artist of all time. Today there are still many artists who consider their work as part of the tradition started by Michelangelo.

How do art history and time intertwine?
Art can be perceived as a symptom of its period. History describes events and creates timelines or narratives that help us make sense of the enormous amounts of dates and other data we have available. History has to rely on the written word, which gives us an incomplete picture. This is because sources are lost, libraries burn down and in some cases complete languages are forgotten.
Art History and archaeology focus on objects. Neither field can exist without the other. The study of objects gives us a much broader and more detailed picture than only texts could do. At the same time we couldn’t begin to place objects in a timeline without the framework of history.

Of course if you study time itself in a historical sense you start to see that it is not exactly a straightforward subject. You might think for instance, that a year is simply that; 365 days and a few hours and they follow each other numerically. But as usual, if you look closer the story gets more complicated, more interesting and that makes it more fun.

What inspires you to talk about ‘time’ to our creative community?
One of the things I like to show people is that when you look at something more closely, or from a different angle than you are used to, a new picture emerges. I try to inspire curiosity. You don’t have to travel the world to see new wonders.

 For instance, when you walk through your own city, look up. Or, on second thought, to be on the safe side, stand still and then look up. The ground floor only offers you the stuff people want to sell you today. The upper floors are where you find the beauty of a city. I’d like to show you the value of looking at the world with different eyes. Not just now but all the time.