Renaissance Readers and Their Books: Representations of a Fugitive Act

Antonio Ricci, York University

The image of a person holding a book appears frequently in Renaissance art and literature. The privileged status of texts in humanist culture and their proliferation after the coming of print technology contributed to the motif’s popularity. This lecture will examine depictions of readers in paintings and poems of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The intention is to recover aspects of the experience of reading during the period and, at the same time, to gain a measure of insight into what remains an elusive phenomenon. What does reading mean? What is it, really, that we are doing when we engage in this fundamentally human act? The Renaissance offers us intriguing answers.

Generously funded by Joe Di Geso.

Presented jointly by CIMS Ottawa and CIMS Toronto.