Biography
Caroline van Eck studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and classics and philosophy at Leiden University. In 1994 she obtained her PhD in aesthetics (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. She has taught at the Universities of Amsterdam, Groningen and Leiden, where she was appointed Professor of Art and Architectural History in 2006. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art at Yale University, and a Visiting Professor in at the Ecole Normale in Paris, the Scuola Normale in Pisa, and the Harvard University Centre for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti. In September 2016 she took up her appointment as Professor of Art History at Cambridge, and in 2017 she gave the Slade Lectures in Oxford on Piranesi's late candelabra: 'The Material Presence of Absent Antiquities: Collecting Excessive Objects and the Revival of the Past'.
Her main research interests are art and art theory of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century; classical reception; the anthropology of art; and camouflage and mimicry as ways of thinking about human art. Since January 2025 she co-directs, with Bram Van Oostveldt (Ghent) a five-year research program funded by the Flemish Research Council on the relations between mimesis, mimicry and the theatre in Antiquity, the 18th century and in evolution theories.
Recent publications include Classical Rhetoric and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Art, Agency and Living Presence. From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Munich and Leiden: Walter De Gruyter/Leiden University Press, 2015); 'Art Works that Refuse to Behave: Agency, Excess and Material Presence in Canova and Manet', New Literary History, 46 (2015), pp. 409-34; 'The Hôtel de Beauharnais in Paris: Egypt, Rome, and the dynamics of cultural transformation', in: K. von Stackelberg and E. Macaulay-Lewis (eds.), Housing the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016);'The Primal Scene of Architecture: Gottfried Semper and Alfred Gell on the Origins of Art, Style and Agency', Revue Germanique Internationale 26 (2017); Piranesi's Candelabra and the Revival of the Past. Excessive Objects and the Emergence of Style in the Age of Neoclassicism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; ' Notes on the prehistory of camouflage as a cultural technique', W86th 30/1 (2023), pp. 3-28, and' From Nineveh to Pergamon and back: Animal hybrids in German historiography of the nineteenth century' RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, February 2025.
In 2014 she received the Prix Descartes-Huygens, awarded by the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in France and the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences; in 2015 she was made a Chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite, and in the same year she received the Grand Prix du Rayonnement de la Littérature et Culture Françaises, awarded by the Académie Française. In 2016 she received a honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel.
In recent years Van Eck supervised PhD theses on, among other topics, new ways of understanding revivalist styles in a 19th-century global context; the role of female art historians in the rediscovery of Quattrocento art c. 1900; and the history of collecting and display.
For the academic year 2024-5 Van Eck will welcome MPhil and PhD applications on classical reception, French art, architecture and interior design from 1750 to 1900, as well as topics related to her camouflage research.
