The artworks in this exhibition complement four courses taught at the college this semester:

• Visuality, Materiality, and Renaissance Literature (Wendy Beth Hyman, Donald R. Longman Professor, English and Comparative Literature)
• The Poem in the Museum: Literature and the Visual Arts (Stiliana Milkova, Professor, Comparative Literature)
• Ingenious Making in the Early Modern World (Christina Neilson, Associate Professor, Art History)
• Beyond the Page: Hybrid Poetics (Clara Rosarius, Lecturer, Creative Writing)

Students will consider—from different disciplinary perspectives—how these artworks use the materials from which they are made as a mode of expression, and how these artworks can be transposed into another artistic medium: the literary text. How are the associations of bronze with blood and liveliness, or porphyry with strength and patience, harnessed by the artist of Hercules to encourage viewers to ponder the corporeal power embodied in this small sculpture? Why does Jamnitzer celebrate the muscularity of Vulcan and his assistants in Vulcan Forging Cupid’s Wing (a wing, after all, is a delicate thing)? Could it be to elevate the bodily talents of the metalworker who designed this plaquette and forged it in a fire just like the god of fire himself? How does a literary text such as Blake’s When The Morning Stars Sang Together compete with the materiality of the object it seeks to represent? How does the word frame the image? Viewers are invited to interrogate the frames—physical, metaphorical, and conceptual—evoked by these artworks and the literary works they inspire and have been inspired by.

Image: Probably German, Hercules, early 17th century. Bronze with marble. Gift of Baroness René de Kerchove, 1953.237.