Heather Smith

PhD Candidate, Department of History, UofT

“Digital Soundscapes of Politics and Parmesan in Ducal Tuscany (1732)”

While the decline of the Medici dynasty is well studied, how this played out across the festive soundscape, as well as the implications this may have had for communities within Tuscan ducal territories, is much less understood. Using a 3D scene, or ‘digital soundscape’ rendered into Unreal Engine 5, this project digitally reconstructs a lively festival event which featured an ephemeral food monument-or cuccagna-staged by the Jewish community in Livorno in 1732 for the arrival of Carlos, duke of Parma and Piacenza, then-successor to the Tuscan duchy. This presentation will examine the political dimensions of this event through a digital lens, while also exploring some key questions that arise during the process of going from sources to digital soundscape.

Jillian Husband

PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, UofT

“‘Quadri di notte e di fuochi’: Girolamo Savoldo and Painting (with) Metal”

Girolamo Savoldo’s Saint Matthew and the Angel (c. 1530-35) constitutes a radical departure from his peers’ devotional works. Emerging from disorienting darkness, Saint Matthew’s monumental form is ablaze, enswathed in a phosphorescent pink robe. Is the intended subject the Christian iconography, or the surface of the painting itself, which dazzles us with the depth of its darkness and the brilliance of the incandescent mass of pink? Savoldo’s striking manipulation of materials has been admired since Giorgio Vasari first praised ‘of night and of fire’ in 1568, but we lack an understanding of what informed this invention. I propose that Savoldo’s nocturnes manifest an active dialogue with the local craft traditions he encountered on his travels throughout northern Italy. In this presentation, I propose that Savoldo’s technical approach to the Saint Matthew and his Magdalene paintings manifests an alchemical process inspired by Lombard metal-adorned textile art and coin minting. Building on network studies and using technical data extracted from conservation reports, my research centers artisanal knowledge as crucial to innovation across the arts in the Cinquecento.