Between the 16th and the 19th century, a new awareness and new uses of the nighttime slowly but unmistakably spread through different parts of the world, whereby new regimes of temporality redefined the spheres of work and leisure, of activity and repose.... Read more about Embattled and Conquered? The History of the Nighttime in the Early Modern World

We owe the Italian Renaissance picture more than the ideal human figure.  Experiments in figuration, whether they involve contour or sfumato, cannot exist without ground, here understood in three senses of the word: first, the preparation of a given support (such as a gesso ground on panel); second, the plane on which figures stand; and third, the field in and against which figuration occurs.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Point, Ground, Figure, Field”

Professor Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, will be presented with the I Tatti Mongan Prize on May 10, 2018, when he will deliver his Laureate Lecture "Berenson and Titian". ... Read more about 2018 Mongan Prize Laureate Lecture. Miguel Falomir, "Berenson and Titian"

The transatlantic slave trade and the plantation complex are well-studied subjects, but scholars have rightly pointed out that we do not clearly understand the earliest phases, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. ... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Economic Institutions and Networks between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The Genoese Trading Diaspora (ca. 1450-1530)”

From Tupinambá anthropophagi to ‘bloodthirsty Aztecs’ or ‘child-killing Incas’, American (human) sacrifices flooded the European imagination in the sixteenth century. In Europe, these images interacted with a heated debate about salvation, the Eucharist, and the role of sacrifice within Christianity.... Read more about Sacrifice and Conversion between Europe and the New World

In 1982, a priest working on the records from the Galileo trial in the archive of the Roman Inquisition accidentally landed upon a file devoted to Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa of Pescara.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “In the Archives of the Inquisition: The Case of Vittoria Colonna”

... Read more about Del Mar Del Mundo: Francesco Durante and the Neapolitan School in the Hispanic Colonies of America

... Read more about Istanbul - Dimitrie Cantemir

... Read more about Dolci Miei Sospiri: Tra Ferrara e Venezia

Asian and American (and sometimes African) toponyms, peoples, terrain, flora, fauna, atmospheres, and cultural productions mingled in the European consciousness long after Columbus, and even as the Pacific was being regularly traversed by European galleons.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “The Amerasian extension in the European imaginary, 1492-1700”

Renaissance doctors, philosophers, theologians, poets, and musicians understood that all sensible experiences of time and space were linked, to a certain extent, to the cosmic order by a universal harmony, an astral-magic rhythm that influenced everything from the rotation of the planets down to the musicality of the pulse.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Titian and the Skies of Tomorrow”