AIA Spring 2024 Lecture Series: Dr. Dennis Geronimus, Department of Art History, New York University

Histories are also stories of forgetting. In images sacred and profane from Venice to Lisbon, Black Africans were largely marginalized in Renaissance imagery – literally so, as bystanders, nurses, kitchen maids, pages, boatmen and gondoliers, servants in crowded banquet halls. Still starker inequalities are impossible to ignore in contemporary lived realities, nowhere more so than that of the trafficking of human beings. With the inescapable truths of the slave trade in mind, we will investigate a range of images drawn from a variety of visual cultures. The crossing of racial and regional boundaries – here, those of Africa and the Mediterranean – has begun in earnest in Renaissance studies, thanks to a growing body of literature and a number of exhibitions that collectively challenge tradition-bound perceptions of early modern art.

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the North Alabama Society of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA).