What can we learn by following the trajectory of a single object? Elizabeth Rodini traces Gentile Bellini’s renowned but puzzling portrait of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II over land and sea and across five hundred years, revealing how a fragile fifteenth-century painting speaks to contemporary matters, from the politics of preservation to the 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.

Rodini’s talk grows out of her newly released book, Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II: Lives and Afterlives of an Iconic Image (London: I. B. Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2020).

This lecture, to be presented on Zoom and held in English, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).