Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe

International Arts & Artists is extremely pleased and honored to announce the touring exhibition, Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe. Originally curated by Nora S. Lambert at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art under the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry, the exhibition brings together approximately 45 paintings, prints, sculptures, and ceramics from over fifteen collections and institutions throughout the United States. Passion, violence, and virtue emerge as fundamental, intertwined elements in the art of Renaissance Europe. The objects on view—created for enjoyment and edification in private homes—offer glimpses into the lives of artists and their audiences. 

Many of the works featured in Lust, Love, and Loss attest to the centuries-long popularity of certain narratives and themes throughout the European continent, while others represent more localized cultural traditions. Fifteenth-century Italy saw an explosion of artworks tied to familial rites of passage, including marriage and childbirth, yet their painted narratives were often not overtly festive. Meanwhile, the Northern European interplay between virtue and vice manifested in innumerable engravings and woodcuts showing even happy and passionate couples faced with the inexorable progression of time. Artists working and traveling north and south of the Alps produced vibrant canvases and complex print series that echoed these ideas in grander formats, purposefully highlighting the consequences of moral trespass or opportunities for redemption.

While this new version of the exhibition continues these same themes, it also offers a more explicit focus on women's experiences as makers, viewers, and owners of artworks. In addition to featuring objects created by female artists, Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe explores the experiences of female audiences through their engagement with the kinds of artworks on display, as well as with one another, through gift-giving and patronage.

Nora S. Lambert is the 2022-2024 Kress Foundation History of Art Institutional Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in late medieval and early modern Italy. From 2021 - 2022, she was a Fullbright Fellow affiliated with the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities in Naples, Italy. She is also a member of the 2020 cohort of the Center for Curatorial Leadership's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice.

IA&A is extremely pleased to bring this exhibition and its artworks to our partners. Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe will begin touring in early 2027 and is now open for bookings.

 

Please contact TravelingExhibitions@ArtsandArtists.org for more information.