Dr. Sara Benninga

Curriculum

Sara Benninga is an art historian and contemporary artist whose work lies at the intersection of art history, cultural history, and the history of ideas. She specializes in Baroque painting, the representation of pleasure, and the body and the senses in early modern northern European art. Her research engages with questions of corporeality, affect, and the visual articulation of licit and illicit experience in the early modern period; an emerging line of inquiry considers the intersection between activism, society, and contemporary art. She completed her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and holds lecturing positions in the Department of Art History at Tel Aviv University and in the Department of Visual and Material Culture at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Her teaching spans early modern art history, iconography, and visual culture, with courses on Baroque art in the Low Countries, Dutch genre painting, the German Renaissance and the work of Rubens, and contemporary art and society.

Her monograph Pleasure and Flesh in the Art of Rubens. Representing the Body in Early Modern Painting is forthcoming with transcript Verlag (July 2026). She has published on Rubens’s letters and Bacchic paintings, the iconography of the meal, conjugal allegory in Titian, fatness and the senses, and Fontainebleau School prints. In April 2026, she convened the session “The Proclivities of Pleasure in Early Modern Art” at the Association of Art Historians annual conference in Cambridge, England. Her research has been supported by grants from Erasmus Mundus, Erasmus+, the Saxony Exchange Program, and the Minerva Stiftung.

Publications (selection)

Pleasure and Flesh in the Art of Rubens: Representing the Body in Early Modern Painting. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2026.
“Different Loves: Venus and Diana as Prototypes of Love in the Prints of the Fontainebleau School.” In: Recherches sur les Réceptions de l’Antiquité, edited by Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas. Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming 2026.
“Titian’s Allegory of Conjugal Love as an ‘Allegory of Peace’.” In: Titian’s Allegory of Marriage: New Approaches, edited by Daniel M. Unger, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022, pp. 183–200.
“The Changing Perception of the Five Senses.” Ikonotheka 29 (2019), pp. 103–122.
“The Faces of Fatness in Early Modern Europe.” FKW: Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur 62 (August 2017), pp. 24–35.

Research project: The Aesthetics of Collective Disorder: The Spectacle of Crowds and Violence in Early Modern European Prints

This project examines how early modern images of crowds and collective violence—particularly in the prints of Frans Hogenberg (ca. 1535–1590)—visualize force as a volatile social energy oscillating between civic order and destructive excess. In my research I ask how scenes of sieges, massacres, and uprisings stage tensions between fear of unruly assemblies and fascination with transgressive spectacle, especially in some of the earliest printed news broadsheets that transformed such events into repeatable visual “reports.” These prints construct an anonymous viewer who shifts between implicated participant and distanced witness, and they do so within emerging media ecologies that treated crowd violence as both information and spectacle.

Three strands structure the inquiry: First, I trace how modular figuration, seriality, and rhythmic density scale up individual bodies into unstable collective formations, making crowd force appear both legible and explosive. Second, I investigate the symbolic charge of transgressive harm in depictions of riot, atrocity, and massacre, in which images simultaneously indict and intensify crowd violence as a political and affective resource. Third, I examine modes of visual moderation – ordered processions, allegorical condensations, and architectural framing – through which artists attempt to stabilize disorder and domesticate disruptive forces into seemingly coherent civic or confessional narratives.

Framing crowd violence as a form of radical non-meaning that nonetheless demands interpretation, the project analyzes how early modern prints render such experiential excess tolerable, negotiable, or intellectually productive for viewers. I treat crowd imagery – and the unstable viewing positions it engenders – as a fragile apparatus for translating collective force into ethical, political, and aesthetic reflection.