Een kleine cultuurgeschiedenis van de (grote) neus

Abstract

As an art history student, Caro Verbeek came into contact with an enormous variety of beautiful noses: large and small, straight and curved, flat and pointed. In many portraits, striking examples turned out to have been further enhanced by the artist. Although today's ideal of beauty suggests otherwise, in the past a large nose was seen as an indicator of intellect, courage, character and status. For example, Dante's death mask was manipulated to give him a real 'poet's nose', the depiction of Cleopatra's eagle nose was a political strategy and the Renaissance poet Annibale Caro even wrote the eulogy 'Nasea' about the considerable nose. In 'A small cultural history of the (big) nose', Verbeek takes the reader on a journey along notable noses in Western art and culture, from Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Gogol to Barbie, Barbara Streisand and #sideprofileselfie. Caro Verbeek shows how much our aesthetic judgment depends on cultural circumstances of which we are often barely aware. But above all, it is an ode to the nose, in all its shapes and dimensions. Caro Verbeek (1980) is an internationally renowned art historian and scent scientist. She teaches at the VU Amsterdam, where she obtained her doctorate in 2021 on art historical scents. She is involved in the EU research program ODEUROPA, and since June 2021 she has been working as a curator at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.