Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Please pre-register for the event through the Zoom link.

Allison Raper (Art History), Rothman Doctoral Fellow: “The Lady in Red: Francesco di Vannuccio’s Croce Dipinta and the Iconography of Mary Magdalene in Late-Trecento Siena”

As one of the most beloved female saints during the fourteenth century, Mary Magdalene occupied a unique role in medieval art as both a reformed sinner and the “apostle to the apostles.” In her presentation, Allison Raper examines the significance of Mary Magdalene’s presence in the base of a large 1370 painted cross by Sienese artist Francesco di Vannuccio. Created in the years following the onset of the Black Death in Italy, this cross stands as a singular example of how mendicant orders used the imagery of Mary Magdalene in fourteenth-century churches to inspire devotion and penitence.

Lauren Walter (Art History), Rothman Doctoral Fellow: “Entre Nous: The Art of Female Friendship in Late Eighteenth-Century France”

During the eighteenth century, discourse by both men and women suggested that female friendship did not exist. In 1761, in her discourse de l’Amitié, d’Arconville wrote that women were “not capable of friendship unless they remove themselves from their essence, and they henceforth approach male virtues that characterize superior men.” Despite these polemics, Lauren Walter argues that female friendships not only existed, but were critical to women’s lives, providing them with a community through which they could freely exercise their agency. By examining works of art, Walter will demonstrate that depictions of female friendship abound in art history, and that they illustrate the ways in which women spent time together and carried out their friendships.