Art History Lecture Series: Maria Loh

Scholars have struggled to identify the two female figures that occupy the unusual horizontal composition in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. Some privilege an iconographic interpretation, reading the painting through lofty Neoplatonic theories; others write it off as nothing more than a charming wedding picture, a vestige of the social historical context in which it was made. It is a question of approach and perspective. This talk, however, will ask: what happens when we look awry at Titian’s women?