Associate Professor of Art History
Department of History, Villanova University

“’Ussire da le cose de putti et fare le cose de homo’: Material Culture, Courtly Gifts, and Masculinity in Early Renaissance Italy”

For a Renaissance boy to become a lord – and “leave behind childish things and do manly things” as Francesco Sforza duke of Milan instructed his son Galeazzo – required that he perform and embody values which were, at once, martial and amorous, enthralling and violent, domineering and charismatic. This demanded not only models to follow, but objects to possess, wear, and command. Attentive to the agency and even volition of material culture, we will investigate the sorts of things – brocaded garments and hunting animals in particular – that lords wielded, gave, and displayed to fashion and demonstrate ideals of courtly masculinity in fifteenth-century Italy.

Lecturer, Department of History of Art
Bryn Mawr College

“On the Decorative Edge: Function and Form in Western Han Eave Tiles (206 BCE-9 CE)”

During the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE-9 CE), the skyline of its capital at Chang’an was composed of lines of eave tiles—circular ceramic fixtures that hang off the edges of roofs. This talk examines eave tiles with writing as their main decorative feature to argue that the ways in which these characters were designed, manufactured, and replicated reveals how Han designers blurred the grammars of ornament and writing in order to produce a unified decorative skin for Western Han imperial architecture.

Thanksgiving Holiday