Details

EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “Renaissance Venetian Women”
Presented by Dr. Paolo Alei
with Additional Commentary by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

Portraits of Women in Renaissance Venice are evasive to interpretation.  Most of them are women with no specific identities.  This hermeneutic indeterminacy has led art historians to speculate whether they are courtesans, brides, or demonstration pieces of “la bella pittura” (beautiful painting).  This lecture will take in consideration a series of representations of women and try to analyze iconographic details (from the way they have arranged their hair to a jewel they might wear), corporeal movement (from a specific gesture of the hand to that pivotal torsion of the body called contrapposto) and finally the interaction between painted subject and the beholder (an exchange of gaze which is much imbued with the poetic trends of the time involving the legendary poetic relationship between Petrarch and Laura).  In some cases, recent scholarship, based on the discovery of new treatises and dialogues of the early modern period, has broken the veil of mystery and this lecture will try to dig a bit further in the discussion of women identities in the Renaissance.

The webinar will include a 45-minute lecture followed by 15-minutes of Q&A.

Please note:

• Your participation is confirmed once you have purchased your ticket. You will receive the Zoom link to join the presentation circa 30 minutes before the start time.
• VIDEO RECORDING of the webinar will be available for unlimited streaming at your convenience for 7 days after the event.

Lecturer

Paolo Alei is an art historian from Rome. He is Professor of art history at the University of California (the UCEAP academic program in Italy) and Curator of the Museum of the Castle of Bracciano near Rome. He has a Master from Columbia University where he specialized on Venetian Renaissance Painting and a PhD from Oxford University where he completed a dissertation on the influence of the Natural History by Pliny the Elder on Italian Renaissance art. He has published several essays on Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, and a book on the history of the Venice Carnival. Recently, he coedited a monumental book about the patronage of the Orsini family in Central Italy. He is co-organizer of EMR (Early Modern Rome), one of the greatest conferences about Renaissance and Baroque culture.