A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Professor of Art History Julia DeLancey
Julia DeLancey, Professor of Art History, will present a free lecture entitled “Florence and the Medici,” at St. George’s Episcopal Church on Friday, Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. There will be a brief reception starting at 6:30 p.m. Sponsored by the Fredericksburg-Este Association, the lecture will explore the powerful Medici family and its patronage of the arts and humanism in Renaissance Florence. Read more.
Professor of Art History Julia DeLancey
On Saturday, October 19, Julia DeLancey (Professor of Art History) presented a paper entitled “The Visual Culture of the Confraternity of the Blind in Early Modern Venice” at the 50th meeting of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. The paper, based on new archival research in the Archivio di Stato (state archives) in Venice, explored the activities of a group (confraternity) formed in the fourteenth century so that Venetians with visual impairments could ask for alms in the lagoon city. The paper also relied on key ideas from disability studies theory, in particular the cultural model of disability laid out by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell (Georgetown University) who spoke on UMW’s campus in the fall of 2018.
This summer saw the publication of a new article by Professor of Art History Julia DeLancey. The article, entitled “Celebrating citizenship: Titian’s portrait of the color seller Alvise Gradignan della Scala and social status in early modern Venice,” looks at the portrait of della Scala—now in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden—by the sixteenth-century Venetian painter, Tiziano Vecellio, more commonly known as Titian. Using new archival discoveries made mainly in the Archivio di Stato in Venice, the article places Titian’s portrait of his colleague and supplier into the larger social and artistic context of Renaissance Venice and presents new information about color sellers and their place in Venetian social hierarchy.
DeLancey, Julia A. “Celebrating citizenship: Titian’s portrait of the color seller Alvise Gradignan della Scala and social status in early modern Venice.” Studi Veneziani n.s. 76 (2017): 15 – 60.