A lecture sponsored by the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium (TRRC) and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (CRRS).
The reign of Charles II, the second Angevin king of Sicily, was one of continuous political and personal crisis, from the prolonged war over Sicily that erupted when he was heir apparent to the deaths of his two oldest sons when they were young adults. Many of his best-known initiatives in art and architecture derived from such crises and served as public, visual resolutions of them and the losses they entailed. Other episodes of the king’s and queen’s patronage also may be seen as responses to the myriad losses they experienced as sovereigns. This lecture examines their unprecedented initiatives in the patronage of sumptuous arts and interprets their efforts as responses to specific losses, rather than characterizing such works as merely expressions of courtly grandeur and excess.
