Hannah Baader will deliver the Lee B. Anderson Memorial Lecture on the Gothic on Tuesday, November 30 at 6 pm. Her talk is entitled “Eco-Gothic, Titian, and the Crossing of the Red Sea.”

In 1549, an otherwise unknown Venetian printmaker published a large-scale print by the then highly esteemed and demanded painter Titian. The piece must have been a re-edition of a lost first version, developed by the artist approximately thirty years earlier. The woodcut is covering a surface of 290 x 100 cm of paper and therefore has the size of a panel painting. Spreading over several sheets, Titian has represented the biblical theme of the Crossing of the Red Sea. As has been noticed, the main protagonist of this representation are the agitated waters, but the meaning of this artistic choice still needs explanation. The work unfolds a dynamic investigation into divine and naturalized powers, political forces or fears and early ecological thought, calibrated with high artistic skills on the surface of the paper sheets.

Hannah Baader
is Senior Research Fellow and Research Group Leader at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institute, where her work focuses on Transregional Art Histories: Spaces, Actors, Ecologies, 1250–1600. She studied art history, law and philosophy in Berlin and Vienna and received her PhD in art history at the Freie Universität Berlin. Before joining the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, she was appointed by the Freie Universität Berlin and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. She was invited as a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2014 and 2016, and served as Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelberg (Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”) and at the University of Zurich. She obtained grants from the Gerda-Henkel Foundation, the Getty Foundation (Art, Space and Mobility in Early Ages of Globalization, together with Avinoam Shalem and Gerhard Wolf, 2010–2015) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices, Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin, 2013–2019). Currently, she is head of the 4A_Lab in Berlin, a research and fellowship program of the Max-Planck Institute in Florence in cooperation with the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

This event will be held via Zoom. A link will be circulated to registrants by 10 am on the day of the event. This event will be live with automatic captions.