The PERLEGO Network is delighted to welcome Ita Mac Carthy (Professor of Italian, Durham University) who will join us for a conversation about her new book, The Grace of the Italian Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2020). Professor Mac Carthy’s book reassesses artists such as Francesco del Cossa, Raphael and Michelangelo and explores anew writers like Castiglione, Ariosto, Tullia d’Aragona and Vittoria Colonna. It shows how these artists and writers put grace at the heart of their work.
The book presentation will be followed by a response from Dr Rebecca Bowen and Professor Elena Lombardi, before a general Q and A.
Ita Mac Carthy is Professor of Italian in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University. Professor Mac Carthy is the author of essays on the grazia of Ariosto, Castiglione and Raphael; edited volumes on Cognitive Confusions: Dreams, Delusions and Illusions in Early Modern Culture(2017), and Renaissance Keywords (2013) and her first book, Women and the Making of Poetry in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (2007).
Elena Lombardi is Professor of Italian at the University of Oxford. Professor Lombardi is the author of Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante (2018), The Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (2012) and The Syntax of Desire: Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae and Dante (2007).
Rebecca Bowen is co-director of the PERLEGO Network, a collaborative research project dedicated to bringing together critical perspectives on text and image. Dr Bowen’s research focuses on Medieval Italian literature and culture. Dr Bowen’s PhD explored personifications of love (‘Amor’) from late antiquity to the Italian Middle Ages.