Webinar 1

EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “Reframing the Renaissance: The Pre-Raphaelites” 
Presented by Dr. Meghan Callahan

In the 1850s, a group of artists including William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais declared themselves the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. The art critic John Ruskin promoted their desire to return English painting to the pure Italian style prior to developments by Michelangelo and Raphael. Inspired by the literature of Boccaccio and Dante, the Brothers created fantasy worlds in their paintings and poetry.

This talk will examine early Renaissance sources for the PreRaphaelite brotherhood, and delve into the meanings within their paintings.

Webinar 2

EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “Marble Queens and Painted Ladies: Women, Art, and Idealism in the Gilded Age”  
Presented by Dr. Mary Ann Calo

Images of women were everywhere in the Gilded Age, so much so that historians talk about the era in terms of the “feminization” of American culture. This refers not only to women being involved in culture, as patrons,  artists, and viewers, but also to the ubiquity of women as subjects in visual art.

Women in this era were closely connected to the arts and art was associated with idealism. Both were understood to exist outside the crass materialism and brutality of the real world. While it was assumed that women do not participate in economic progress as active agents, within their separate spheres they are agents of idealism; the same was true of art itself, whose primary function was to uplift and instruct.

This lecture will explore how Gilded Age representations of women in visual art signify and embody multiple notions of idealism. On the one hand, women were associated with the concepts of beauty and perfection. Such images often reflect highly romanticized notions of how women should look and how they should behave. But it also became common in the Gilded Age to use women, sometimes nude or dressed in “historical” costumes,  to personify abstract ideals such as truth, learning, and justice. In these kinds of images women were symbols, far removed  from actual experience and informed by Italianate depictions of mythological and religious figures. We will also look at artists who resisted these impulses towards idealization and sought to portray women and their lives in more realistic terms.

Webinar 3

EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “Making the Mona Lisa” 
Presented by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

When Leonardo da Vinci began painting the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the wealthy Florentine cloth merchant Francesco del Giocondo, in 1503, little did he know just how much employment he would generate for future art historians. From theories concerning her enigmatic smile, to the painting being a self-portrait of Leonardo in drag, to her possibly being pregnant, it seems that just about everything that COULD have been written about the Mona Lisa HAS been written. Join Dr. Rocky for this exclusive webinar where, in addition to analyzing the formal aspects of the painting, he will discuss just why the painting is so famous.