What can we learn by following the trajectory of a single object? Using a renowned but puzzling Renaissance portrait as the starting point, Elizabeth Rodini will explore how a fragile fifteenth-century painting speaks to a range of contemporary matters, from the politics of preservation to ideologies of imagery and beyond.

Rodini is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. Previous to her arrival at the Academy, she was teaching professor and founding director of the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University. Her interests lie at the intersections of historical inquiry and contemporary practice, and center on the mobility of objects across time, space, and imagination. Recent work examines the reception of Islamic objects in Venice; museological developments in twentieth-century Paris; and the exhibition of African art in contemporary American museums. This lecture grows out of her forthcoming book, Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II: Lives and Afterlives of an Iconic Image (forthcoming from I. B. Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2020).

The shoptalk will be held in English.