Veerle Thielemans: Sharing Pleasures at the Art History Festival

Each year, the festival deals with a universal subject such as dreams, nature, madness, laughter, etc. This year’s theme is pleasure. Why? Because it’s key to our relationship with art: the pleasure we feel looking at objects and images and the pleasure artists take in making them. Moreover, whatever the times, the iconography of sensory pleasures is extremely rich. Art historians have always been interested in interpreting it by focusing on the depiction of feelings and the gestures associated with them. The theme of the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste—leads us to address aesthetic, social, political and other kinds of questions without, however, overlooking those raised by contemporary gender studies on the male and female gaze. What place could be more appropriate for this than the Château de Fontainebleau, whose gardens, decoration, furnishings and architecture embody the pleasures of the Court? …