Megan Holmes on the Lives of Italian Renaissance Panel Paintings

Описание: Collections of Italian Renaissance panel paintings were in many cases assembled through a process of connoisseurial evaluation. The National Gallery of Art collection is no exception: a number of the paintings passed that evaluative scrutiny in spite of surface damage in the form of intentional scratches—noted in later conservation reports as “vandalism.” Defacement and disfiguration are, in fact, fairly common features of panel paintings, but they are rarely mentioned in art-historical accounts. The paintings, once installed in religious, domestic, and civic spaces in Renaissance Italy, were acted upon and transformed by the people who encountered and used them in their daily lives. The recovery of representational scratches provides a timely opportunity to tell the history of Italian Renaissance art differently, revealing the complex earlier “lives” of paintings in the hands of beholders.


The Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art features distinguished scholars present­ing original research. This annual lecture series offered by the National Gallery of Art began in 1997 and is named after the great specialist of Italian art Sydney J. Freedberg (1914–1997). Professor Freedberg earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1940, where he taught for 29 years until he was appointed chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in 1983.

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