CRRS and the Department of Art History present
The CRRS has partnered with the Department of Art History to bring you a special lecture event featuring Morten Hansen from Washington’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
May 4, 2023, 5:30–7 pm
Emmanuel College Room 119
(75 Queen’s Park Cres. E.)
Among the monumental statues with pagan subjects carved by Vincenzo de’ Rossi for Cosimo I de’ Medici, duke of Florence, two stand out by deploying both bawdy and philologically sophisticated sexual humor: the Hercules and Diomedes in the Palazzo Vecchio and the Theseus and Helen in the Boboli Gardens. Like the erotic works created for the duke by such artists as Bronzino and Benvenuto Cellini, Vincenzo de’ Rossi’s sculptures have presented a
challenge to scholars as the duke was known to uphold sexual morality in both politics and personal life. The works of art, however, can be seen as part of a broader phenomenon of erotic mythologies among the Habsburgs and their princely supporters in Italy beginning in the 1520s. At court such works can be seen to produce an effect of hyper virility or godly manliness; attributes of imperial authority that were upheld by the Italian vassal princes during Charles V’s absence. The advent of Tridentine Reform and the clerical reaction against nudity in secular art did not cancel the need to display status through erotic art, as exemplified by Titian’s poesie for Philip II, the upholder of Tridentine Reform in the Spanish Empire. The talk proposes a new subfield of research: pictorial representations that associate same-sex sexuality—sodomy in sixteenth-century terms—with the men of the Ottoman Empire.
Since receiving his PhD, Hansen has taught at the University of Copenhagen and at Stanford University. He has also worked at art museums in Copenhagen and Baltimore. Hansen has held fellowships at the Villa I Tatti — the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy — and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. His research deals with art of Early Modern Europe. Hansen has published on such topics as imitation and irony in Italian Mannerism, cults around miraculous images, the pictorial construction of social identities involving representations for and of ethnic-religious minorities, word/image relationships, and Ludovico Ariosto and the pictorial arts.
