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Satire and Sympathy: Depictions of Social Outsiders in Early Modern Art

GETTY CENTER

Museum Lecture Hall

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To complement the exhibition Giacomo Ceruti: A Compassionate Eye, where low-income tradespeople and individuals experiencing homelessness are portrayed in large-scale paintings with realism and emotional depth, Getty curator Davide Gasparotto and art historian Tom Nichols address pressing questions in the representation of social outsiders in early modern art. Why do images of those on the margins of society proliferate in visual media from ca. 1500 onwards? What are the main patterns of representation of social outcasts? Who is typically shown in these images and who typically looked at them? These and related questions will be explored through an illustrated conversation.

SPEAKERS
Davide Gasparotto is senior curator of paintings and chair, curatorial affairs, at the J. Paul Getty Museum. He is the curator of the exhibition Giacomo Ceruti: A Compassionate Eye.

Tom Nichols is Reader in History of Art at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. His research interests encompass the imagery of impoverished and outcast people in the early modern centuries and the intersections between art and identity in painting of the Venetian Renaissance. His books include The Art of Poverty: Irony and Ideal in Sixteenth-Century Beggar Imagery (Manchester University Press, 2007); Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe: Picturing the Social Margins (edited, Ashgate, 2007; Routledge, 2017); Tintoretto, Tradition and Identity (Reaktion Books, 1999; second revised edition 2015); Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (Reaktion, 2013); and Giorgione’s Ambiguity (Reaktion, 2021).