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Art History Talk – The Ballad of Miss Fortune

March 6 @ 11:30 am - 1:30 pm
A woman with short dark hair and clear glasses wears a sleeveless brown patterned top, standing in front of bookshelves filled with books.

Please join us in the Berrie Center Café at 11:30 for a special talk by Art Historian Maria Loh in which she bridges renaissance imagery and notions of misogyny.

This event is held in conjunction with GODDESSES 3.0, on view in the Kresge and Pascal Galleries February 25 – April 10. More information on GODDESSES 3.0 can be found here!

ABSTRACT

Kairos, Occasio, and Fortuna are complex facets of the same goddess of luck, but at a certain moment in time a troubling, schizophrenic iconography came into being, which cast Lady Luck as a distinctively female force, both a capricious agent controlling the Wheel of Fortune and also as a body that could be either violently seized or wildly adored. This lecture will explore the uneasy gendering of Fortuna in some early modern images such as an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi in the Metropolitan Museum that bears the descriptive title A Naked Man Holding Fortune by the Hair and Whipping Her. Rather than simply cancelling an image as such, I would like to take the opportunity to reflect upon the ideological work that such artworks accomplished in their own time and to push us to think about how we can and must make sense of them as twenty-first-century viewers.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maria H. Loh is Professor of Art History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Previously, she taught at CUNY Hunter College for six years and at University College London for over a decade. She is a contributor to Art in America and the author of three books—Titian Remade. Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (2007); Still Lives. Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master (2015); and Titian’s Touch. Art, Magic, & Philosophy (2019). She has also written on: horror and “special affect” in early modern painting and sculpture; rainbow imagery in Stuart England; melancholia and the Renaissance in Ottocento Italy; remakes in Chinese cinema; repetition in Hitchcock’s Vertigo; seriality and Sherrie Levine; and the “open work” of Jeff Wall. Her forthcoming book—Liquid Sky—will be written for a general audience. 

Image: Maria Loh, courtesy of the Institute for Advanced Study.

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