Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe – Conversation with a Curator

Joint Event with The Fortnightly of Chicago

Join in an absorbing and spirited morning conversation about Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe. On view at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago from April 8 to June 13, 2021, Lust, Love, and Loss is the first loan exhibition at the Smart dedicated to Renaissance art in nearly two decades. Exhibition curator and Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow Nora S. Lambert will discuss passion, violence, and virtue as interconnected elements in select paintings, engravings, and luxury wares. These works of art—created for private homes as enjoyment and edification—played an essential role in intimate, personal experiences, while at the same time shaping and responding to massive intellectual, political, and religious shifts throughout Europe between 1400 and 1700. Together, we will talk about the stories behind some of the artworks, the people who treasured them, and the process of bringing them together from art museums throughout the country for this very special exhibition.

Presenter: Nora S. Lambert is the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Smart Museum of Art and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in late medieval and early modern Italy. As the Smart’s Mellon Fellow, Nora is the curator of the spring 2021 exhibition, Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe. Previously, she held positions at museums, including the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, several New York City collections, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she curated the exhibition, Picasso Prints: Myths, Minotaurs, and Muses. Her essay on the depiction of crusading in the Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral was published in the edited volume, The Crusades and Visual Culture, in 2015.

IWA Contact: Gay-Young Cho