On-Line/Live Event
POP-UP WEBINAR | “A Renaissance Christmas 4.0” with Dr. Rocky Ruggiero
December 23, 2024
1 hour
$25.00
EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR BUNDLE
“Exclusive Webinars in November”
Presented by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero and special guests Dr. Niall Atkinson, and Dr. Laurinda Dixon
Dates & Times:
Thursday, November 3, 10, 17
2:00 – 3:00pm ET | 11:00am – 12:00pm PT |
7:00 – 8:00pm London
EXCLUSIVE WEBINARS | “Exclusive Webinars in November”
Each webinar will include a 45-minute lecture followed by 15-minutes of Q&A.
Please note:
EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “The problem of being yourself in a Renaissance City”
Presented by Dr. Niall Atkinson
with Additional Commentary by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero
A merchant in fourteenth-century Naples has to relieve himself at night in an alley, a woodcarver in fifteenth-century Florence decides to ignore a dinner invitation, the poet Petrarch finally arrives in Rome for the first time, and a Roman servant returning to his native city can’t remember where his mistress’ palace used to be. What do all these characters have in common? They are all hopelessly lost. Pre-modern city-dwellers constructed their sense of self by linking their fates to the structures and people with which they lived. But what if those same city-dwellers found themselves in unknown territory or suddenly found that the streets they thought they knew had become a series of alien encounters? This presentation explores the nature of the relationship between familiar and unfamiliar urban spaces in the Renaissance. Contrary to prevailing assumptions about the emergence of the modern individual as a self-made entity, these episodes reveal just how unstable one’s identity actually was and just how difficult it was to actually “know thyself.” Such knowledge was always a negotiation between the self, others, the past, and the built environment. In our current world, where cities are becoming ever more densely aggregated into diverse real and virtual overlapping neighborhoods, communities, and territories, we stand to learn a lot, by looking to the past precisely at the moment of the re-urbanization Europe, about how we can participate in the construction of cities, with and against the policies that shape our cities from above. In doing so, we can make cities work for us and make them meaningful to our everyday lives.
EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “Simplicity, Loveliness and Grace: Leonardo da Vinci’s Burlington Cartoon”
Presented by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero
When Leonardo returned to Florence in the early 1500s, he immediately made his presence felt. Giorgio Vasari recounts how a Leonardo cartoon was put on display in the church of Santissima Annunziata and how great crowds “would gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created.” Shortly thereafter, Leonardo received the commission for his most famous work, a portrait of Mona Lisa del Giocondo – better known to the world as the Mona Lisa.
Dr. Meghan Callahan has lived and worked in London since 2006. Like Rocky, she earned her Master’s degree in Art History from Syracuse University as a Florence Fellow. She has a Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University. Meghan is the Assistant Director for Teaching and Learning at Syracuse University London, where she has taught art history and history classes on Italian Art in London and the UK; Women and Art: London and UK; and Underground London.
She worked on the reinstallation of the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and then with the sculpture dealer Patricia Wengraf. Meghan has published various articles and essays on the architectural patronage of the 16th-century mystic nun Sister Domenica da Paradiso, miraculous paintings in Renaissance Florence, and Italian Renaissance and Baroque sculpture.
EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’: Remnants of a Fossil Science”
Presented by Dr. Laurinda Dixon
with Additional Commentary by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero
Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516), one of the major artists of the Northern Renaissance, had a seemingly inexhaustible imagination. Known as the creator of disturbing demons and spectacular hellscapes, he also painted the Garden of Earthly Delights, where gleeful naked folk feast on giant strawberries in a fantastic paradise garden. Little is known of Bosch’s life or the circumstances underlying this famous painting, and his art has remained enigmatic, variously interpreted as the hallucinations of a madman or the secret language of a heretical sect.
This lecture presents Bosch as a man of his time, knowledgeable about the latest techniques of painting, active in the religious life of his community, and conversant with the intellectual developments of his day. It draws upon the Renaissance science of alchemy, the ancestor of modern chemistry, to elucidate the meanings of Bosch’s elusive imagery.
