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.