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, onsiteZoom & 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

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