Browse Exhibits (3 total)

           Venice, a celebrated city known for its exceptional quality of artworks. It was a pious city from the early Renaissance period and Venetians had a strong belief in God. Religious faith in Venice was highlighted through many mediums such as paintings in the churches and decorative productions that emphasized Venetian piety. Furthermore, traces of Venetian history were embedded in those painting as well. Paintings in Venice goes outside the limitation of just blotches of colors, it is a full story on its own.

          During the wake of the art Counter-Reformation, many artists start to shift the focus within the painting from mere portraits of holy figures to more of a story or scene. Venetian artists back in the 15th to 17th century will use artistic elements to convey the story of biblical allegories and stories along with symbolism. Most of the time, when an artist adds some abstract elements within the painting, they usually have some meaningful purposes beyond just decorations. Indeed, paintings are different from books, the painter often has to think about how to convey a story and its background history within the painting. Perhaps, sometimes even the most common decorations in the painting may represent other things. If the painting is a biblical allegory, it will most likely to adopt symbolism from the bible [1]. Or a simple facial expression may hint at the theme of the story in the painting. As a matter of fact, this almost demonstrates how carefully each artist has to reflect on the scene within the painting and the amount of attention paid to each detail. As a result, every painting will also require the viewer to examine every detail carefully in order to grasp the message conveyed from the paintings.

[1]Bernhard Ridderbos. "Antonello's 'Saint Jerome in His Study'." The Burlington Magazine 124, no. 952 (1982): 449. http://www.jstor.org/stable/880731.

In Renaissance Venice, the woman question – her virtues, capabilities, and role in society – was very much up for debate.The women depicted in this exhibition emerge from the darkness. They are independent, alert to the expectations of their audience, often in motion – activity that was sometimes viewed as unnatural for a sex that was understood by many of their contemporaries to be passive by nature. They are makers, movers and shakers.

In 1991, Margaret King’s Women of the Renaissance explored a range of women’s lived experiences and perceived roles in Renaissance thought. Through identifying archetypes in early modern writings, King and other scholars have shown how women were cast into roles determined by factors such as their reproductive status, marital status, family background and class. Interpretations of their lives as expressed in images has sometimes conformed too closely to these tropes, presenting a woman as embodying a persona of virtue or vice, nobility or humility, intellectual or worldly. In many ways, the complex identities of the women shown here have paradoxical characteristics as figures who both operated within the confines of and transcended (even transgressed) societal expectations.

This exhibition has two aims. First, it celebrates the significance of individual women to cultural production in early modern Venice as artists, poets, philosophers, patrons, and allegorical figures. Second, through the affordance of the digital medium, it draws attention to the multiplicity of their roles and identities. Through three digital galleries, individual works appear several times as illustrations of overlapping themes, allowing for visualization of their diverse roles. This exhibition argues that conflicting interpretations of their images need not be resolved by finding the “correct” answer, but rather that simultaneous consideration of their paradoxical features and virtues leads us to a richer understanding of the woman question and its disputants in early modern Italy.