Date/Time
Date(s) - February 15, 2024
6:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Location
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, University Center for the Arts

‘God is in the Details’: Clues in the Backgrounds of Raphael’s Madonnas

Presented by Linda Wolk-Simon in conjunction with current restoration by Cindy Lawrence of the Museum’s Painting, Virgin and Child.

Join us in the Organ Recital Hall for this exciting lecture on Thursday, September 11 at 5:30 p.m., with 16^th century Italian musical prologue of Renaissance Marian music, lecture by Linda Wolk-Simon and reception to follow in GAMA

‘God is in the Details’: Clues in the Backgrounds of Raphael’s Madonnas.

Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Raphael belongs to the famous Trinity of High Renaissance painters. Throughout history, his extraordinary fame and soaring reputation has rested largely on his many paintings of the Madonna and Child. Created as objects of spiritual devotion and later upheld as icons of tender maternal affection, his many depictions of this eternal subject inspired preeminent European and American artists like Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Auguest-Dominique Ingres, and Benjamin West. Raphael’s Madonnas were also faithfully copied by legions of diligent if anonymous students in far-flung art academies, whose handiwork is today scattered among countless museums, libraries and private collections around the world. And throughout the centuries, these famous images were replicated in thousands of etchings and engravings that made his art widely accessible to all social classes and can still be found at flea markets and tag sales today. So moving and seductive in their exquisite beauty are Raphael’s most iconic images that viewers understandably linger on the principal, holy figures, failing to notice the myriad details found in the backgrounds of the compositions—details that often yield insights and information about why such works were made, and what meanings and associations they carried for their original owners and moment in history.  This lecture will look at the backgrounds of some of Raphael’s most storied Madonnas and decipher the clues and cues hidden in plain sight.

A reception will follow with food and beverages. Free and open to all!

LINDA WOLK-SIMON

Linda Wolk-Simon, who received her PhD in the History of Art from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is a specialist in sixteenth-century Italian art with a focus on Raphael and his workshop in Rome.  She was for many years a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and subsequently Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints and founding Director of the Drawing Institute at the Morgan Library & Museum.  Most recently, she was Director and Chief Curator of the Fairfield University Art Museum in Connecticut, where she organized the critically acclaimed exhibition The Holy Name. Art of the Gesù: Bernini and his Age, and co-authored and edited the accompanying catalogue, in recognition of which she was inducted into the National Jesuit Honor Society in 2018.  For the past decade she has been Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, teaching graduate courses on Curatorial Practice, Old Master Drawings, and Italian Renaissance and Baroque art.  She has organized exhibitions, lectured, and published extensively on Raphael and his workshop, especially Giulio Romano and Perino del Vaga, and on sixteenth-century Florentine art and Italian Old Master drawings.  In addition to numerous exhibition catalogues and essays in collected volumes of papers, she has published articles and reviews in Apollo, Art Bulletin, The Burlington Magazine, Colnaghi Studies Journal, Master Drawings, and Renaissance Quarterly.   Her publication Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece was awarded a prize for excellence by the Association of Art Museum Curators.  She is currently co-editing a volume of essays on Raphael to be published in 2026 by Brepols and working on an exhibition commemorating the 500^th anniversary of the Sack of Rome, which will take place at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome in 2027

VIRGIN AND CHILD, CIRCA 1500 (Pretreatment)

Formerly attributed to Fiorenzo Di Lorenzo (circa 1455-1525)

Oil on panel

33 x 23 inches (panel); 42 x 32 inches (frame)

Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, CSU, gift of Larry Hartford and Torleif Tandstad, 2016.1.22