Contemporary Art Quilting
This is a lecture that addresses the history of art quilts with images and explanations that take quilts off beds and onto walls and as sculptural artworks.
Topic Category: The Arts
Fashionable Beauty in Botticelli’s Paintings
This session provides a close look at Sandro Botticelli’s techniques for rendering enchanting fashions in his paintings and drawings. By folding and pleating fabric with light and shadow, simulating colorful dyes with rich pigments, and weaving complicated patterns into his garments, Botticelli captured the alluring beauty of the textile industry in fifteenth-century Florence. This talk examines examples of garments … Read more
Illuminated Manuscripts
This talk examines the construction, writing, and illustration of illuminated manuscripts, particularly choral books, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It provides examples for understanding page design and technical expertise. It also looks at the chronological development of illustration during this period.
Raphael’s Madonnas
Throughout his career, Raphael Sanzio created numerous sweet and beautiful Madonna and Child devotional paintings. This talk examines the development of devotional paintings in the Renaissance and their location within the domestic interior. It examines Raphael’s Madonna paintings in relation to devotional and artistic practices in Florence and Rome in the early sixteenth century.
Venus’s Verdant Virtues
Venus is a goddess of nature, who thrives in verdant places. Artists commissioned to illustrate her landscapes were challenged, not only in rendering specific atmospheric qualities but also in portraying a green geography that would remain evergreen. Green pigments, in fact, posed many challenges to fifteenth-century Florentine artists. If not bound properly or if exposed … Read more
Painting Skin: Complexions, Cosmetics, and Reproduction in Renaissance Florence
This talk explores Florentine portrayals of the female nude, including Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century discourses concerned with skin, fertility, and the feminine toilette. It argues that these paintings 1) offered instruction to women in the arts of beauty and 2) provided a physical image that could aid in the … Read more
Michelangelo and his Marbles
This talk explores Michelangelo’s use of marble throughout his career. It looks at obtaining marble from the mines in Carrara and the marble itself as an artistic material. The talk provides an overview of how Michelangelo sculpted bodies in marble, drawing attention to his manipulation of anatomical form in sculptures, such as the Bacchus, Pietà, … Read more
Ornamenting Psalmody: The Illuminated Choral Books of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence
This talk explores original research conducted in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence on a set of 19 rare choral book produced at the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence. These books, “the largest perhaps in Italy” according to Giorgio Vasari, were written and illuminated between 1390-1520. Monks from the Order and outside artists … Read more
Colors in Renaissance Florence
This talk examines the colors of Renaissance paintings, diving deeply into the natural origins of pigments. These colored substances, which could derive from minerals, semi-precious gemstones, plants, and insects, were bound with egg yolk, gum resin, oil, and lime water to create paint mediums for different surfaces in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This talk … Read more
