Which would you rather hear about for 20 minutes?

Hi friends and family. Here's what I've been working on lately. Both of my abstracts were accepted for the Renaissance Society of America's conference this year! I can only present one paper, though, so I'll have to choose. Vote for your favorite in the comments!




A Violent Intellectual Allegory: Jacopo de' Barbari's Battle of Men and Satyrs

The ironies of Pollaiuolo’s seminal Battle of the Nudes—colorless violence on paper, bloodless despite exposed skin, mythological tone yet mysterious subject—were taken up in a woodcut by the Venetian painter and printmaker Jacopo de' Barbari. His Battle of Men and Satyrs (1495-7) stages a classicizing battle in monumental scale and showcases a complex, multi-figure composition with the nude male in dramatic action. Perhaps responding to Venice’s wars against mainland enemies in the 1490s, yet set in remotest antiquity, the Battle must have appealed to Jacopo’s humanist audience. Analysis of the Battle alongside Jacopo's subsequent woodcut, The Triumph of Men Over Satyrs (1495-7), the first three-block print, reveals the Battle to be a Renaissance humanist allegory of the struggle between Reason and Lust, Apollonian and Dionysian values, and civilization over barbarity. This fantastic battle, and its resolution in triumph, allegorizes the scholar’s Apollonian ideals verses baser instincts through violence.



ABSTRACT: A Printed Journey to Ottoman Rome: Pieter Coecke van Aelst's Manners and Customs of the Turk

While Western Europeans increasingly traveled to Istanbul during the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566), Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s (1502-1550) ten-block woodcut The Manners and Customs of the Turk (1553) visually documents his own trip in a novel way that shows a sympathetic and multivalent understanding of the Ottoman peoples. Prepared for publication by his widow, the artist Mayken Verhulst, the seven scenes of the print stretch four and a half meters--leading the viewer on a parallel journey--from a rough, treacherous landscape to the civilized grandeur of Constantinople. Moreover, the print offers an early ethnographic study of the daily life of Ottoman peddlers and soldiers, women and children, musicians and dancers, even a triumph-like procession of Suleyman himself, by an artist who had traveled intimately among them. By depicting Constantinople as a new Rome, this work complicates any simplistic broadsheet-influenced view of the Turk as a monolithic barbaric threat.