Dr. Joe Luzzi

What makes Dante such a fascinating and essential author – and why is his classic from 700 years ago, The Divine Comedy, more relevant to our everyday lives than ever before? Join us for a truly unique celebration of Dante and his work, as Joseph Luzzi, award-winning Dante scholar ...

Dr. Paolo Alei

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” (beauti...

Dr. Dennis Romano

Dr. John Paoletti

Renaissance art is made to communicate ideas – social, political, religious, historical – to the viewer.  Of course, that raises issues of who is talking to whom and how should that address be structured.  That means that the intended viewer played (and still plays) a critical ...

Dr. Sally Cornelison

Today, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, food processors, and other appliances simplify the ever-present need to clean house and put food on the table, among other chores. This lecture explores moralizing and instructional treatises, paintings, prints, and the study of urban con...

with Quentin Hardy

Artificial Intelligence is powerful, futuristic, and a little scary. But away from the hype, it’s quite familiar, and closely tied to some of the most powerful themes and aspirations of the Renaissance: Imitation, perfection, classical learning and a new exploration of the wor...

Dr. Jeremy Wasser

A central tenet of the Christian faith is that Jesus was crucified by the Romans and died on the cross at Golgotha. The art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is replete with representations of Christ’s Passion prior to the crucifixion and of Christ crucified including works by...

Dr. Fabrizio Ricciardelli

In Europe city-states developed following diverse origins. There were: 1) ancient roman cities; 2) new cities founded near castles; 3) new cities founded near monasteries; 4) cities built in hostile but naturally protected environment (like Venice); 5) settlements estab...

Prints for the People: How the Printing Press Revolutionized Renaissance Art and Thought

Dr. Laurinda Dixon

The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century began an unprecedented technological revolution in the Western world. For the first time, books and ...

Love, Corruption, & Pursuit of the Oscar: Three Revolutionary Academy Nominated Italian Films From 1969/70

Dr. Peter Weller & Jordan Ledy

The Second World War leveled a fascist, then partisan Italy. Using real locations, a film movement emerged, now called Neorealism. However, we might just cal...

The image of The Last Supper is as readily familiar, Kenneth Clark once wrote, as the boot shape of Italy on a map. However, the history of how this famous mural came to be painted, how precisely Leonardo painted it, and who he painted it for, are much less well-known. Ross King will describe how...

Disruptive technologies decimating big chunks of the economy. Social-media unrest. Fake news. Shady international dealings, and religious wars. And that's before we get to Da Vinci and Raphael. Yes, we're talking about the Renaissance, a time not only of great art and thought, but of technologica...

Dr. Gary Radke

Italians have always loved to eat—and show off what they’re eating—so join us in exploring how Renaissance Italians took dining to new heights. Even without tomatoes and cannellini beans (which were just being discovered in the Americas), Renaissance Italians set healthy tables th...

The Florentine Renaissance conjures images of beautiful frescoes and altarpieces, of snow-white marble statues in sinewy poses and the soaring dome of Santa Maria del Fiore—the handiwork of the city’s brilliant artists and architects. But equally if not more important for the centuries to follow ...

"It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow…" writes Italian Jewish author Primo Levi in his well-known memoir of survival, If This is a Man (Se questo è un uo...

What do you think of when you hear the name Leonardo da Vinci – artist, inventor, Renaissance Man? But what about Leonardo as an anatomist, physiologist, cardiovascular researcher, or biomedical engineer?
Beginning around 1510, Leonardo had the opportunity to observe dissections by the great cont...

Renaissance artists’ fascination with the real world led them to explore and depict surprisingly engaging representations of ugly subjects, not just beautiful and idealizing ones. While many people maligned the unfortunate or ugly as evil, artists often found unrecognized beauty and meaning in im...

The case for David’s homoeroticism depends on two suppositions: First, the figure’s alleged prurient physical deportment; for to look at the bronze, as it stands in the Bargello makes it seem camp, gay, sweet, effeminate or any other gender cliché. Secondly, its iconography must be secular, not r...

In 1649, the painter Artemisia Gentileschi told her Sicilian patron Don Antonio Ruffo: “I will show your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.” Renaissance women’s work as artists and patrons has been overshadowed by more famous men such as Michelangelo and the Medici. In this talk we’ll exam...

Five days before Italy’s official Dante Day on March 25, 2021, you can get a head start on the 700th anniversary celebrations by “meeting” the Supreme Poet himself, in a LIVE STREAM conversation DIRECT FROM FLORENCE, ITALY, hosted by Professor Eric Nicholson of Syracuse University Florence and NY...

Mention of Renaissance Florence tends to make us think of beautiful frescoes and altarpieces, of snow-white marble statues and Brunelleschi’s dome rising above the city’s cathedral. But Renaissance Florence had other heroes, too: manuscript hunters, teachers, scribes, scholars, librarians, and bo...

The extraordinary art collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577-1633), housed in the famous Villa Borghese in Rome, was assembled and commissioned according to the concept of paragone. Based on the famous simile by poet Horace ut pictura poesis (painting is like poetry) in antiquity and theo...

Mafia-type organizations in Italy continue to not only survive but thrive in the present day despite the attempts by the Italian State to combat the phenomenon. One of the major obstacles to fighting the mafia is the persistence of social acceptance and support for these organizations in communit...

The Renaissance created innovations in finance, commerce, and the power of a personal brand. Ideas of Credit, Faith, and Fortune all took on double-edged meanings that are with us today - and explain why the face of an unknown man by Botticelli sold for $90 million this year.
Quentin Hardy is the...