Reimagining Raphael lecture by Lisa Pon and Tracy Cosgriff

Please join us for the 2023 Terry K. Simmons Lecture

Pages, Plaster, and Computer Screens: Reimagining Raphael and the Library of Julius II

by Lisa Pon & Tracy Cosgriff 

Monday, March 13, 6pm
Stone Auditorium
210 Woldenberg Art Center

Abstract Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, once the private library of Julius II, manifest a monumental thesis on Renaissance theories of word and image. The rediscovery of the Stanza’s collection of deluxe volumes demonstrates that the chamber was animated by a recursive chain of media, from painting to text. Using 3D technologies to reunite the books and the frescoes, this panoramic reconstruction illuminates new dimensions of the Stanza’s experience for its early visitors and elucidates the synergistic intellectual web on which the room's design was predicated. It asks: How was the Stanza engaged by its early modern audience? How might the spatial analysis of the pope’s literary collection shape our interpretation of the chamber’s meaning? How does the relationship of text and image inform our understanding of Renaissance cultures of reading? And how do these investigations inform current urgent discussions about what a library has been and could become? 

Lisa Pon, Professor of Art History, University of Southern California
Lisa Pon specializes in early modern European art, architecture, and material culture, focusing on the mobilities of art, artistic authority and collaboration, and the Renaissance concept of copia or abundance.  Her first book, Raphael, Dürer and Marcantoni Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, was published with Yale University Press in 2004; Cambridge University Press published her most recent monograph, Printed Icon: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire, in 2015; and she is co-editor or co-author of three additional volumes. Her articles have appeared in venues including Art Bulletin, Art History, Word & Image, Print Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Boletín del Museo del Prado, and Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Tracy Cosgriff, Assistant Professor of Art History, College of Wooster
A lifelong student of Latin and Greek, Professor Cosgriff is interested in the relationship of word and image in Renaissance Italy, the reception of antiquity, and the history of the book. Her research focuses on the painter Raphael and his critical engagement with the classical tradition. She is currently completing a book on Raphael’s famous frescoes in the private library of Julius II, revisiting these canonical compositions in light of the pope’s collection of luxury manuscripts and printed books. Forthcoming publications reconsider aspects of Raphael’s pictorial practice and the legacy of his papal patrons. Other projects investigate the intersection of artistic and poetic design, including the visual inheritances of Horace and Dante.

This lecture is supported by the William L. Duren ’26 Professorship Program.