Larry Silver will be coming to speak at the Seminar in Renaissance and Early Modern Material Culture on Wednesday, January 23, 2013. His talk is entitled “India Ink: Imagery of the Subcontinent in Sixteenth-Century Europe.”

Larry Silver is the Farquhar Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching since 1997. He has previously held positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Northwestern University, and Smith College. He received his B.A. degree with honors from the University of Chicago and his M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from Harvard University. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, Silver has published extensively on painting and graphics in northern Europe during the Renaissance. Recent publications include The Essential Dürer, co-editor, Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age, co-author, Shelley Perlove (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009); Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and Hieronymus Bosch (New York: Abbeville, 2006). His forthcoming essay, “World of Wonders: Exotic Animals in European Imagery, 1515-1650,” will appear in Animals and Early Modern Identity, Pia Cuneo, ed. (Ashgate, forthcoming 2013). Additionally, Silver has organized several exhibitions, including “Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian” (co-curated with Elizabeth Wyckoff, Wellesley College), which appeared at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Yale University Art Gallery, and Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008-2009.

From the time that Vasco da Gama opened up the Indian Ocean for Europe (1498), India became an object of exploration and trade. Soon imagery of India in pictures and accounts filtered back to European audiences, replacing earlier medieval fantasies of the “Marvels of the East” from the margins of world maps. Sixteenth-century imagery of India examined the varied peoples, as well as the flora and fauna of the subcontinent, with documentary purpose of eventual trade and colonization of the region. Early sixteenth-century woodcut representations by Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair in Germany attest to the deep fascination that India held. By the end of that century, illustrated Dutch publications by Jan van Linschoten and Theodor de Bry provided fuller written and illustrated ethnographies of India, which would thereafter inform later atlases and travel books.

Light refreshments will be served at 5:45 pm. The presentation will begin at 6:00 pm.

RSVP is required.

PLEASE NOTE that our Lecture Hall can only accommodate a limited number of people, so please come early if you would like to have a seat in the main room. We also have overflow seating available; all registrants who arrive late will be seated in the overflow area.