Willamette Institute for Continued Learning - Michelangelo to Michelangelo: The Modernity of Early Modern Art

"The talk will explore a crucial aspect of Renaissance and early modern art: its capacity of taking a critical position on the social, political, and even religious principles that guided the communities – or power systems – these artists worked for or in association with. By emphasizing the value of critical thinking as a key element of early modern art, the lecture will examine the long-lasting legacy of works made by masters such as Michelangelo (Buonarroti) and Michelangelo (Caravaggio), showing how their groundbreaking innovations often stemmed from radically reassessing – and sometimes subtly reversing – the narratives they were expected to support. Professor Santos received his B. A. and M.A., Università di Roma “La Sapienza” (Italy) Ph.D., Università degli Studi di Bologna (Italy) Post-Doctoral, Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane – Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze (Italy) Professor De Mambro Santos is an expert in Italian and European Renaissance and Mannerism. He has taught for twelve years in the Department of Art History at the University of Rome courses on Renaissance Art Literature and Visual Culture as well as classes on Methodologies of Art Criticism. He is also strongly interested in problems related to the Historiography of Art and has published many articles on Julius von Schlosser, Benedetto Croce and Lionello Venturi. In 2011, he organized at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art a major exhibition of Italian sixteenth and seventeenth-century drawings."