Twelfth Distinguished WAI Lecture on Renaissance Art and Culture

A Murder, a Mummy, and a Bust – Forensics of a Renaissance Portrait Sculpture

Professor Jeanette Kohl, University of California, Riverside

Tuesday, 24 September, 7.30–9.30 pm, UTC+8 Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, onsite, Zoom & Livestreaming [London 12.30–2.30 pm; Berlin 1.30–3.30 pm; New York/Washington D.C. 7.30–9.30 am] LHS Art Museum, Shanghai

Francesco Laurana (1430–1502), Saint Cyricus (detail), marble, 38.7 diameter, 1470 – 1480. Los Angeles: J. Paul Museum. 

On Easter Sunday 1475, the dead body of a 2-year-old Christian boy named Simon was found in the cellar of a Jewish family’s house in Trent, Italy. Town magistrates arrested eighteen Jewish men and five women on the charge of ritual murder. In a series of interrogations that involved the use of torture, the magistrates obtained the confessions they needed. Eight were executed, others committed suicide in jail. The accusation was torture, strangulation and bleeding the infant to death to use his blood for the preparation of the Passover bread. The case of Simon of Trent went down in history as one of the most brutal and consequential blood libels against a Jewish community in Early Modern Europe. Lesser known is the heated debate about the visual and written propaganda the event set in motion in the cities of Northern Italy and Southern Germany. In my lecture, I will present a new identification of one of the major Renaissance sculptures in the J. Paul Getty Museum, the bust of a child erroneously identified as Saint Cyricus. I will discuss new conservatory and iconographic evidence for the object as a key work in the ferocious, anti-Semitic propaganda around the Trent blood libel of 1475. I will also reinterpret the bust’s role as a devotional image and its relation to the cult of relics that soon emerged around the dead body of Simon of Trent. The unusual object in the Getty collections is a particularly suited object to talk about the role of visual and conservatory observation, knowledge of historical contexts, and questions of methodology in Renaissance art history.

Speaker’s short bio:  Dr. Jeanette Kohl is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. Since 2021, she also serves as director of the UCR Humanities Center (CIS). Her research in art history focuses on portraiture, sculpture, and concepts of artistic representation and memory in the Italian Renaissance. She earned her PhD from the University of Trier/Germany in 2001 with a dissertation on Bartolomeo Colleoni’s burial chapel in Bergamo/Italy (“Fama und Virtus,” Berlin 2004), which was awarded the university’s prize for outstanding dissertations. Kohl has received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the NEH, the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Köln, the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS), and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. Her new book “The Life of Busts. Fifteenth-Century Portrait Sculpture in Italy” is in press with Brepols for 2025.

Registration

If you are residing outside mainland China and interested in attending this or other WAI lectures, please register for virtual participation: https://forms.gle/LAj5SkGCuy7Pgu1x9

Tenth Distinguished WAI Lecture on Renaissance Art and Culture

Titian’s Touch

Prof. Dr. Maria Loh, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Thursday, 5 September, 7.30–9.30 pm, UTC+8 Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, onsite & Zoom
[London 12.30–2.30 pm; Berlin 1.30–3.30 pm; New York/Washington D.C. 7.30–9.30 am]

Titian (1490–1576), Portrait of a Lady (“La Schiavona”), ca. 1510–1512, oil on canvas, 119.4 x 96.5 cm. London: National Gallery.

Any given museum or collection will inevitably have a series of paintings that have been categorized simply as Portrait of a Lady for lack of a better title. In the National Gallery in London, there is an extraordinary painting by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, 1488/90-1576) that has been known for many centuries as both Portrait of a Lady and also La Schiavona, meaning the portrait of the “Dalmatian Lady.” These two titles, I argue, are at once too generic or too specific and neither does justice to the brilliance of the portrait executed by the Venetian Renaissance artist at the start of his long and illustrious career. What more might be said about this portrait, in particular, and about portraiture, more broadly? In the hierarchy of genres, portraiture has long been ranked at the bottom along with still life painting because they are thought to be imitative arts. But a portrait often seeks to achieve so much more than merely recording the surface likeness of a person for posterity. This first lecture in Shanghai will consider these questions in relation to the London painting of the unknown “lady” as well as a second portrait of a disgraced cleric, painted twice by Titian. The aim of this presentation will be to demonstrate the existential nature and philosophical work that portraits undertake.

Speaker’s short bio: Maria Hsiuya Loh is Professor of Art History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Loh is the author of Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art, Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master, and Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic & Philosophy. Her scholarship has developed radical new approaches to key issues in the field of art history, producing groundbreaking work on originality and repetition, and the emergence of the early modern artist. Loh has also written on rainbow imagery in Stuart England, melancholia and the Renaissance in nineteenth-century Italy, remakes in Chinese cinema, repetition in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the work of contemporary artists such as Sherrie Levine and Jeff Wall.

Registration

If you are residing outside mainland China and interested in attending this or other WAI lectures, please register for virtual participation: https://forms.gle/LAj5SkGCuy7Pgu1x9

Kindly note that Professor Loh’s WAI lecture was initially planned for 23 August 2024, but it has been rescheduled to 5 September 2024. If you are interested in joining this event via Zoom, please mark box number 10.  Those who have registered will receive timely email notifications with the Zoom links prior to each scheduled event. 

ART HISTORY AT WORK LECTURE SERIES

Restitution of Cultural Property: International Conventions and Their Practices

Jihon Kim, Ph.D.
Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Harvard University Asia Center
Chief of International Cooperation,
Korean National Commission for UNESCO

Since the end of the Second World War, international organizations have introduced several conventions to combat the illicit trafficking of cultural property and facilitate its restitution. These conventions have gradually increased awareness within the international community and helped to moralize the art market. They have also enabled peaceful settlements related to the
restitution of stolen or illegally exported cultural properties.

This talk introduces key ideas of those international conventions for the restitution of cultural property. In particular, the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property adopted in 1970, and the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects adopted in 1995 will be the main focus. Additionally, several cases from the US and Korea will be analyzed to demonstrate both the achievements and challenges faced by the international community.

This talk also aims to help students understand the work of international organizations in the field of art and culture.

Thursday, May 30, 2024 at 4:00pm via Zoom.
Register here

Eighth Distinguished WAI Lecture on Renaissance Art and Culture

Praised to the Skies: Elevation, Framing and Sacred Space in the Renaissance Pala

Alison Wright, Professor in Italian Art c. 1300-1500, Department of History of Art, University College London

Friday, 17 May 2024, 7.30-9.30 pm, UTC+8 Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, and Hong Kong, onsite & Zoom 
[11.30 am–1.30 pm, London; 12.30–2.30 pm, Berlin; 6.30–8.30 am, New York/Washington D.C.]   

Ercole de’ Roberti, Pala Portuense, 1479-1481, detail, oil on canvas, 323×240 cm. Made for S. Maria in Porto Fuori, Ravenna. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Around 1500, a “revolutionary novelty of pictorial language” (Salvatore Settis) can be observed in Venetian painting, which clearly deviates from the concept of “historia” as formulated by Leon Battista Alberti and implemented by early Renaissance painting, especially in Florence. Particularly in paintings by the old Giovanni Bellini, the early deceased Giorgione and the young Titian, there are hints of an alternative conception of what paintings can achieve. At the centre of this understanding is less an intellectual-scholarly ambition or the precise and reliable communication of certain thoughts than a form of perception in which viewing and contemplation are combined in a distinctive way. In addition to what a depiction gives us to see and reflect upon, i.e. the figures, actions and the meanings conveyed with them, what counts at least as much in Venetian pictorial culture is that a painting stimulates its audience to a specific doing and an unusual experience: to a thoughtful looking. The lecture will present this pictorial concept and ask to what extent it can be traced back to late medieval inspirations. The thesis will be put up for discussion that it is precisely the rather traditional cultural practice of Christian allegoresis from which essential impulses could be taken to arrive at a new conception of the possibilities of painting. This conception, in turn, was to become of great importance for the art of the early modern period. Pictures – as Venetian paintings show – cannot be reduced to being manifestations of a clearly predetermined meaning, but prove to be objects of open, temporally extending contemplation and reflection. Based on these observations, the concluding part of the lecture will outline more general considerations on the temporality of viewing pictures. 

Registration

If you are residing outside mainland China and interested in attending this or other WAI lectures, please register for virtual participation: https://forms.gle/LAj5SkGCuy7Pgu1x9

Kindly note that Professor Wright’s lecture was initially planned for May 24, 2024, but it has been rescheduled to May 17, 2024. If you are interested in joining this event via Zoom, please mark box number 7. Those who have registered will receive timely email notifications with the Zoom links prior to each scheduled event. 

A Panoply of Colours, A World of Materials: Global Connections of Early Modern Dyes

This conference is free and open to the public

Register to attend in-person or via Zoom

Conference attendees should register their vehicle to get access to free parking in Lot 1 Blue: https://www.offstreet.io/location/IB7CPSO8

(for a map of UCR parking lots, click here)

What kinds of histories do textiles and dyes tell? They represent not just culture, artistic expression, and ‘beauty’ but also science, technology, labor, and economics. Their histories are entangled in the histories of commerce, slavery, and colonialism, as well as resistance to them. As dyes come from plants and animals in different ecosystems, how did knowledge about processing and using dyes circulate in the early modern period (before 1850)? Can they help us gain insight into Indigenous forms of knowledge, cultural philosophies, histories of religious conversion, and cultural exchange? How do they expand our understanding of the histories of science and technology? When we foreground the materiality of textiles and dyes, what are the distinct cultural contexts that come into view? What are the spatial relationships, environmental conditions, and technological limitations that become important to understand
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Schedule

9:00 – 9:30 am – Welcome

9:30 – 10:45 am – Keynote by Aboubakar Fofana, “Indigo Pasts and Futures in West Africa: A View from Mali”

10:45 – 11:00 am – Coffee Break

11:00 am – 12:40 pm –  Session 1

• BuYun Chen,  “From Field to Vat: The Life of Indigo in the Ryukyu Islands”
• Sylvia Houghteling, “Fleeting Dyes and Fresh Fabrics: Perishable Materials in the Eastern Indian Ocean Textile Trade”

12:40 – 1:40 pm – Lunch Break

1:40 – 3:20 pm – Session 2

• Sean Silver, “Early Modern Mordants: History, Theory, and Practice” 
• Michelle Rawlings, “The Fading Colors of West Mojave”
• Chi Yen Ha, “Beyond Indigo Blue: Exploring Inter-ethnic Dynamics in Knowledge Expansion and Creativity in Vietnam’s Natural Dyeing Movement”

3:20 – 3:50 pm – Coffee Break

3:50 – 4:50 pm – Tyrrell Tapaha, “People and the Pigments: the Ethnobotanical History of Diné Weaving and the Colorado Plateau”

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Organised by Jody Benjamin (Assistant Professor of History), Yong Cho (Assistant Professor of Art History), Savannah Esquivel (Assistant Professor of Art History), and Fatima Quraishi (Assistant Professor of Art History). This conference is made possible through the support of the Center for Ideas & Society, CHASS Dean’s Office, Department of Art History, Department of History, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Department for the Study of Religion, Department of English, Reclamation & Native American Communities Commons Group, Queer and Trans Commons Group, Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, and Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual, and Performance.

Photo: Naoya Wada. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Meeting the Unknown: Albrecht Dürer and the Aztecs

Manuel Teget-Welz, Ph.D.
Department of Art History
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

Albrecht Dürer is the most important German Renaissance artist. He had a keen interest in the unknown and traveled a great deal, including to Italy and the Netherlands. Following the cruel conquest of the Aztec Empire by Hérnan Cortés in 1519, the Spanish received numerous gifts from the last Aztec ruler, Moctezuma II. These were sent to Europe to Emperor Charles V and were exhibited in numerous cities. Dürer had the opportunity to see the Aztec objects in Brussels, and wrote in detail about this encounter with the unknown in his diary.

Wednesday, April 3 at 5:15pm, ARTS Seminar Room 333