[Hum_Calendar_Events] CMRS Voces Nostrates Lecture: Joanna Woods-Marsden on May 6, 2010

[CDH Help Desk]

The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies invites you to a lecture by Joanna Woods-Marsden on Thursday, May 6, 2010, at 5:00 pm in Royce 314. Her lecture is "L'Arme and Gli Amori: Gendered Identity in Titian's Portraits for the Este Court of Ferrara" and is the last in the Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies' Voces Nostrates lecture series for this academic year.

Professor Woods-Marsden examines the visual construction of male and female identity in portraits of rulers by Titian, looking in particular at his depictions of Alfonso I d'Este, duke of Ferrara, and his low-born mistress, Laura Dianti. The duke's portrait reflects the imperatives of virility and martial potency demanded of masculine identity in Renaissance Italy. In his mistress's likeness, on the other hand, Titian attempted to construct not only the male ideal of female beauty and eroticism but also the Virtue required of a ducal concubine. Laura, moreover, is accompanied by an African slave, the first to appear in Western portraiture. In the discourse on race of the era, the black child's aesthetic function resided in the contrast between his nerissimo face and his mistress' bianchissimo beauty.

Joanna Woods-Marsden (PhD Harvard, 1979) is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art at UCLA and a member of CMRS since 1984. She specializes in Renaissance courts and artists, portraiture, and gender studies. She is the author of numerous works including Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (1998), and edited Titian: Materiality, Istoria, Portraits (2007). She is currently completing The Visual Rhetoric of Male Power and Female Beauty: Gendered Identity in Titian's Court Portraits. 

Advance registration is not required. Please sign the attendance sheet at the door. No fee. Seating is limited, available on a first-come, first-served basis. More information about the Voces Nostrates Lecture Series is on the CMRS's website at http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/voces_nostrates.html <http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/voces_nostrates.html> .


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