There is a delicious drawing in the Ashmolean Museum that shows the lantern of the Florentine Duomo being smashed to pieces. The artist and date are unknown, although some have connected the image to a terrible storm that knocked the gilded cross and orb off the top of the Florentine cathedral on a cold winter’s night in 1601. Strange things were known to fall out of the skies. Hail storms, frogs, crucifixes, and sometimes even people, too. This talk focuses on Dosso Dossi’s peculiar Portrait of a Gentleman in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A man. A labyrinth. An armillary sphere. A little pear. A donkey. A bolt of lightning. And a smouldering pair of wings. The cryptic portrait serves as a point of departure and return in order to consider representations of the early modern sky as an ambivalent site of ambition and hubris, of hope and anxiety.

Maria H. Loh is Professor in Art History at Hunter College. She is the author of three books: Titian Remade. Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Getty Research Institute, 2007); Still Lives. Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master (Princeton, 2015); and Titian’s Touch. Art, Magic, & Philosophy (Reaktion, 2019). Her fourth book—Liquid Sky—will be on visual representations of the early modern sky.

This special lecture is generously funded by the June and Simon Li Foundation.