Gastvortrag: Guido Messling über das Paradies in der Malerei.
18. November 2025
16:15 - 18:00 Uhr
KU Linz: Hörsaal 1
Paradise – as a mythical-religious point of origin, an idealized living space, and an eternal object of longing – has long shaped conceptions of ideal space and the good life. Whether religiously motivated or secularly imagined, the idea of a better world finds expression in imagery and architectural visions that go far beyond purely functional or aesthetic concerns.
This lecture series “(Re)Constructing Paradise: Religious and Transcultural Perspectives on Ideal Spaces" focuses on spatial designs that understand architecture as an expression of social, religious, and political orders – as imagined worlds that create community, represent power, and materialize transcendent ideas of a better world.
Attendance is free - no registration required! / Eintritt frei - eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich!
Trees, Bushes, and Evil. Gardens of Paradise in Early Modern Painting
Guido Messling (Wien)
The biblical Garden of Eden as the site of the Fall of Man is certainly the best-known image of paradise in early modern European painting. However, depictions of gardens as symbols of lost or longed-for ideal states can also be found in other thematic contexts.
The lecture explores these various, sometimes closely related pictorial traditions and explains how evil also repeatedly appears as a counter-image or condition of paradise.
About the Speaker
Dr Guido Messling (born 1967) is the Curator of German Painting at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. He received his PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2002. From 2001 to 2005 he worked at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Over the past decade he has mainly published on German Art of the 15th and 16th century and has curated and co-curated exhibitions on Lucas Cranach (Brussels/Paris 2010/11 and Tokyo/Osaka 2016/17), on expressionistic tendencies around 1500 (Frankfurt/Vienna 2014/15) and on the Ottoman Orient in Renaissance art (Brussels/Krakow 2015). He has also held teaching positions at the universities of Passau and Vienna.