A lecture by Leonard Barkan (Princeton)
with a response by Maria Loh (CUNY Hunter College), Thick Paintings

For almost two years, some of the most extraordinary mythological paintings made by the Venetian painter Titian for the Spanish King Philip II have been traveling the world, and are now in Boston at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum ("Titian: Women, Myth &Power" open until 2 January 2022). Titian’s paintings, which he called poems, remind us, once more, of the fascinating but problematic place that erotic painting holds in the construction of the discourse of Renaissance art. They raise important questions on the nature of modern spectatorship, between humanistic poetics and the invention of voyeurism.