Rebecca Messbarger & Francesca Berni
Italian board painter (Filippo Dolciati?), detail of The Story of the Florentine Antonio Rinaldeschi, dated 1501/2, tempera on wood. Florence, Museo Stibbert (artwork in the public domain)
Rebecca Messbarger
From the Gallows to the Dissection Table
The nascent book project on which she is working in Rome, explores the ways in which the paradigmatic criminal body and actual human bodies, living and dead, inspired and defined critical innovations of the Italian Enlightenment and its influence, more broadly, on eighteenth-century European discourse and politics. In her talk, Rebecca Messbarger will focus on transformations that took place in Bologna under the leadership of Archbishop Prospero Lambertini (1675–1758), the future Pope Benedict XIV. She explores Lambertini’s pivotal initiatives and reforms centered on the human body, including his momentous semiotic disentanglement of the capital execution from public dissection, when he called upon Bolognese faithful to donate their bodies for the public good of medical dissection.
Rebecca Messbarger is the Rome Prize Fellow in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. She is professor of Italian and affiliate professor of history, art history, performing arts, and women, gender, and sexuality studies, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St. Louis.
Francesca Berni
Novissimo Landscape
Novissimo Landscape is a project that includes various investigation tools and supports and within which different research experiences and fields of application converge. For the American Academy in Rome residency, Francesca Berni will intercept some landscape fragments and bring them into the room, abstracting them. The impression and expression of the landscape will be the two spatial dimensions, singular and collective, that the design on large fabrics will transmit in a continuous rewriting of our present. She will then explain the project for the residency at the Academy, illustrating how and why the setting up of the landscape into the room is informed by Western and East Asian thought.
Francesca Berni is the Enel Italian Fellow in Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture and an architect in Milan.
The shoptalks will be held in English.