Sarah Gwyneth Ross delivers Henriette Hertz Lecture
Professor of History Sarah Gwyneth Ross, an expert in Renaissance Europe, especially Italy, was invited to deliver the annual Henriette Hertz Lecture at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. Located in Rome, the Bibliotheca Hertziana promotes scientific research in the field of Italian and global history of art and architecture and is considered one of the world's most renowned research institutes for art history.
Each year the Bibliotheca Hertziana invites an outstanding scholar to share insights drawn from his or her current research. The lecture is named for the institute’s founder, Henriette Hertz (1846–1913).
Sarah Gwyneth Ross
Ross’s lecture, “Ut pictura comoedia: The Andreini Family and the Arts in Renaissance and Baroque Italy,” is based on her current book project, which is centered on four generations of the Andreini family, a mercurial lineage of creatives spanning the late Renaissance and Baroque eras who were variously comic actors, poets, monk-alchemists, soldiers, nuns, and painters. Her presentation focused on the ways the performing and visual arts intersected—and sometimes competed—within this particular family as well as in the larger cultural world the Andreini inhabited.
Ross's most recent book, Everyday Renaissances: The Quest for Cultural Legitimacy in Venice, drew on some of the same types of original unpublished sources that inform her current research—wills, diaries, household inventories, account books, and other miscellany—to reconstruct the lives of more than 100 artisans, merchants, and others on the middle rung of Venetian society who embraced literature and learning.
“It was an extraordinary honor to be invited to deliver the annual Henriette Hertz Lecture at the Bibliotheca Hertziana,” said Ross. “And I mean ‘extraordinary’ in all senses of the term: I was both delighted and honestly a little perplexed at first to receive the invitation from this particular institute. I know that the Hertziana nurtures the kind of interdisciplinary passions that its founder Henriette Hertz exemplified, but even so it does center on art history, and I'm not an art historian. My research typically brings together a pretty wide range of source materials, from literary texts to economic and legal records and, yes, the occasional work of art, too; but I considered myself a historian-historian.
“I went to Rome hoping above all else to learn from this amazing community of scholars who know a lot more about the art world per se than I do,” added Ross, who teaches courses on women in Renaissance culture with BC art historian Stephanie Leone. “I'm delighted to report that's exactly what happened.”