You are invited to our next HAD Faculty Conversations featuring Diana Gisolfi and Sarah Wilkins. Diana and Sarah will each speak for twenty minutes, and there will be time for questions and conversation. Refreshments will be provided.
- Diana Gisolfi, “The Scuola dei Mercanti (1570) in Venice: A case study of societal and artistic loss occasioned by Napoleon’s decree of 1806”
- Sarah Wilkins, “Exterior Shrine to Interior Altarpiece: Rinaldeschi, the Madonna de’ Ricci, and the Desecration of Street Art”
Date: Thursday, April 10th, 2025
Time: 12.00 – 1:00 pm
Venue: Main 212
“The Scuola dei Mercanti (1570) in Venice: A case study of societal and artistic loss occasioned by Napoleon’s decree of 1806”
This presentation looks at the example of the Scuola dei Mercanti as one of the many institutions in Venice whose societal role was destroyed and patrimony confiscated after Napoleon’s decree of 1806, which suppressed the scuole of the Venetian Republic. One of the larger of the “scuole piccole”, also called confraternities, the Mercanti’s building, which had been renovated c. 1570-72 and decorated in the early 1570’s- 1592, was stripped of its furnishings and paintings. I offer a partial reconstruction of the complex and discuss the functions of the three halls. Palladio, Veronese, and Tintoretto were among the artists commissioned by the board of the Scuola.
Diana Gisolfi, Professor of History of Art and Design and Director of Pratt in Venice, was trained at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago. She was chair of Art History at Pratt for many years and served on key committees at the College Art Association. Her books: with Staale Sinding-Larsen, The Rule, the Bible and the Council, CAA monograph LV, 1998; Paolo Veronese and the Practice of Painting in Late Renaissance Venice, Yale University Press, 2017. She is published in such peer review journals as The Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, Arte Veneta, Artibus et Historiae, Renaissance Quarterly, has contributed essays to exhibition catalogs on Veronese and Tintoretto, and presented in numerous international and national conferences.
“Exterior Shrine to Interior Altarpiece: Rinaldeschi, the Madonna de’ Ricci, and the Desecration of Street Art”
An infamous event involving street art occurred on 11 July 1501 in Florence. Having lost while gambling at a tavern, the frustrated Antonio Rinaldeschi smeared dung on a fresco of the Virgin in a street tabernacle, a decision that led to his execution. Previously unremarked, the Madonna de’ Ricci was immediately acclaimed as miraculous and became the focus of intense devotion. Interestingly, though its cult was directly due to the image’s accessibility enabling Rinaldeschi’s desecration, within months the church took action to enclose it within a chapel and control access. This talk explores the processes and reasons for this transformation.
Sarah Wilkins’s research focuses on mendicant and Angevin patronage, the representation of women, and the cult of the saints. She has published on the visual cult of the Magdalen in Naples and Assisi and was co-editor of Art and Experience in Trecento Italy, the inaugural volume of Trecento Forum, a book series, for which she is series co-editor. Dr. Wilkins received an RSA-Kress Research Fellowship for her book project on the Magdalen Chapel in the Bargello, Florence, to which this talk relates. She was President for the Italian Art Society from 2021-23 and is Adjunct Assistant Professor, CCE at Pratt.
Please RSVP.
* This event is for Pratt community.
