What’s Her Name? Identifying Beautiful Women (Belle Donne) in Renaissance Art

Mary Vaccaro, associate professor of art history at the University of Texas at Arlington, will present “What’s Her Name? Identifying Beautiful Women (Belle Donne) in Renaissance Art” as part of the Museum’s “Art in Context” series.

In Renaissance Italy, artists often recast women’s appearances to conform to a more generalized standard of physical perfection, which makes it difficult to determine whether a painter meant to portray a real person’s likeness or evoke a concept of imaginary beauty. In this free lecture, Vaccaro will consider images of beautiful women in terms of the issues of identity, portraiture, and the rhetoric of beauty.

An expert on Italian Renaissance art, Vaccaro recently received the UTA Outstanding Research Achievement Award. In 2007­–2008, she was awarded the J. Clawson Mills Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where she undertook research on drawings in sixteenth-century Parma. Vaccaro is also the author of numerous articles and essays focusing on the artist Parmigianino, among others.