History of Art Research Seminar Series 2025

Critical (Ms.) Fortune: A Feminist History of the Italian Renaissance?

Maria H. Loh

5pm November 11

Cinema, The Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities

Kairos, Occasio, and Fortuna are complex facets of the same deity of luck, but at a certain moment in time a troubling, schizophrenic iconography came into being, which cast Lady Luck as a distinctively female force, both a capricious agent controlling the Wheel of Fortune and also as a body that could be either violently seized or wildly adored. This lecture will explore the uneasy sexualization of Fortuna in some early modern images such as an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi in the Metropolitan Museum that bears the descriptive title A Naked Man Holding Fortune by the Hair and Whipping Her. Rather than simply cancelling an image as such, I would like to take the opportunity to reflect upon the ideological work that such artworks accomplished in their own time and to push us to think about how we can make sense of them as twenty-first-century viewers.

Maria H. Loh is Professor of Art History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Previously she taught at UCL and CUNY Hunter College. She is the author of three books: Titian Remade. Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (2007); Still Lives. Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master (2015); and Titian’s Touch. Art, Magic, & Philosophy (2019). She is currently working on two books: Liquid Sky (On Visual Representations of the Early Modern Sky) and Critical Fortune: Early Modern Lessons for the Twenty-First Century.