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”

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”

Boccaccio’s tale of Calandrino and the heliotrope is justly celebrated as a masterful reflection on art and illusion. In this seminar, Justin Steinberg will explore the political dimension of this reflection.... Read more about Thursday Seminar "The Artist and the Police: Decameron 8.3"

Bramante is widely credited for having pioneered a new and assertively antique architectural style in Rome at almost the very start of the sixteenth century, as is supposedly demonstrated by his Tempietto which is almost universally agreed to date from around 1502.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Bramante and the untidy unfolding of the ‘High Renaissance’”

The origin of the madrigal is a recurring topic in musicology. Did it evolve out of the frottola (Einstein 1949), the chanson and motet (Fenlon and Haar 1988) or the carnival song (A. Cummings 2004)?... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Revisiting the origins of the madrigal”

In this talk, Nicola Suthor will discuss the long-standing literary tradition of a controversial artistic performance first demonstrated in ancient Greece and consisting of drawing a form or figure by means of a single continuous line.... Read more about Thursday Seminar “Exuberant lines: On so-called ‘calligraphic’ drawings in 17th-century Italy”

From the moment of his marriage to his new consort Maria de’ Medici in 1600, Henri IV began to sanction imagery that promoted her value to the French monarchy.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: “The Paradoxical Queen in the Garden: Maria de’ Medici at Fontainebleau”

“Writing, Mobility and Distance in the Making of the Society of Jesus (1540-1573)” / "La Biblioteca Hernandina: Hernando Colón’s New Cartography of Knowledge"

... Read more about Thursday Seminar: Paul Nelles / José María Pérez Fernández

“Gothic and Anti-Gothic in Ruskin’s Renaissance” / “The Secret Lives of Books: Toward a Biography of Dante’s Divine Comedy” 

... Read more about Thursday Seminar: Jeremy Melius / Joseph Luzzi

L'argomento del intervento è la presentazione di una serie di oggetti realizzati in materiali poveri (cera, paglia, stucco ) cercando di ripercorrerne la storia e la provenienza.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: “Artigianato virtuosistico: opere d’arte nascoste create nei conventi italiani e francesi.”

In 1616, Monteverdi told Alessandro Striggio that he couldn’t imitate winds because they are not human. “Ariadne moved us because she was a woman and similarly Orpheus because he was a man.” But what if Orpheus was not a man driven by his own internal passions and creative instincts but instead was an automaton—an inanimate machine with spontaneous motion and sound creation.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: What if Orfeo was an Automaton?

A model of ‘Civic religion’, understood as municipal attempts to develop legitimacy through sacred language and devotional activities, is now widely used by historians of late medieval and renaissance Europe. In this seminar Andrews will...

Lucrezia Marinella developed an interpretation of Aristotle's claims concerning sexual difference and body temperature, and also elaborated a set of criticisms of those claims.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: The Reception of Aristotle in Lucrezia Marinella's "La nobiltà et l'eccellenza delle donne co'diffetti et mancamenti de gli uomini" (Venice, 1601)