This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West.

In the eyes of many art critics who attended the United States’ 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—an international event of colossal proportions—two of most noteworthy and controversial art works on display were The Death of Cleopatra (1876) by the Rome-based African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844–1907) and The Abolition of Slavery (1873) by the Trieste-based Italian sculptor Francesco Pezzicar (1831–1890). While past and present commentaries have viewed the marble and bronze statues independently, and thematically and aesthetically distinct from one another, this talk offers more radical and interconnected interpretations of the two sculptures. Both were created on the Italian peninsula in an atmosphere of lingering doubts about the greater nationalist project that was then underway, and both rendered their respective subjects with an idiosyncratic corporeality that, in tandem with their inferred narratives about the end of slavery and nobility in death, broached more psychological and spiritual concerns. These historical and thematic correspondences argue for an inquiry unbound by stylistic categories or East/West binaries but, rather, considerations of the aesthetic sensibilities and synergies that developed within the post-Risorgimento artistic milieu.

Richard Powell is the James S. Ackerman Scholar-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome in fall 2017. He is Dean of the Humanities and the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University.

The event is organized in collaboration with the Rome Art History Network.

The lecture will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.