Playing with Scales: The Art of Restraint in the Dutch Republic

Closing Date of Opportunity: November 27, 2025

Name or Organization: Calgary Institute for the Humanities

Contact Email: cih@ucalgary.ca

Website: http://playingwithscales.eventbrite.ca

Post Content: The Calgary Institute for the Humanities presents the 3rd Annual Egmont Lee Founders' Lecture

Date: Thursday, November 27, 2025
Location: Burnswest Theatre, The Confluence
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 p.m
The lecture will be followed by a small reception.
This is a free public event. Registration is required: https://playingwithscales.eventbrite.ca

Play and illusionism were key aspects of Dutch visual culture during the seventeenth century. Objects in a variety of media were produced to incite wonder through active physical engagement, playful deception or artful mimesis. This talk will highlight how miniature objects produced for a dollhouse participated in these playful explorations and became one way that certain women were able to display their intellectual and artistic engagement. After locating dollhouses within the artistic milieu of the Dutch Republic, the second half of the talk will shift focus to one detail from a dollhouse that has been largely overlooked by scholars. Focus on this miniature object associated with restraint will provoke reflection on what it may reveal about the person who commissioned it as well as the larger seventeenth-century society.

Dr. Anuradha Gobin is Associate Professor in the University of Calgary’s Department of Art and Art History and was a 2024-25 Resident Fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. She is the author of Picturing Punishment: The Spectacle and Material Afterlife of the Criminal Body in the Dutch Republic (2021).