Spring 2026 Events
THURSDAY, APRIL 30: Meg Lionel Murphy (UW-Madison, Art)
5:00 pm, Elvehjem L150, Lecture “Flowering Wounds: Medieval Imagery and the Healing Body”
Medieval art offers contemporary painters a set of visual and conceptual strategies for releasing internal suffering into external, communal repair. Across devotional manuscripts, protective charms, bestiaries, and apocalyptic texts, the body becomes a site of growth, protection, and spiritual power. Moving from medieval spell-casting to mid-century surrealism and contemporary myth-making, a lineage emerges of artists invested in rendering the body as living technology: a flowering wound, a lactating saint, a figure mid-metamorphosis. Such images do not merely represent pain, but perform it, transmute it, and carry it across time. Ultimately, Murphy will offer an intimate vantage into a painting practice where image-making itself functions as a ritual of protection and emergence.
Meg Lionel Murphy began her art practice after surviving severe domestic violence, leaving a career in publishing to begin an artistic world-building project rooted in trauma and transformation. In the tradition of Remedios Varo and John Wilde, her subjects are scaled so large they become landscape and memorial, holding witness and warning. She is currently an MFA candidate in Painting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Murphy is represented by Portrait Society Gallery, has exhibited nationally at museums, galleries, and art fairs, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Hyperallergic, and New American Paintings.
See more of Murphy’s work here.
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Co-sponsored by Anonymous Fund and the departments of Art, Art History, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Integrated Liberal Studies.
THURSDAY, APRIL 16: Denva Gallant (Rice University)
April 16, 5:30 pm, Elvehjem L160: Lecture “Blackness, Black Africans and Giotto’s Mocking of Christ”.
Musicians within grand processions, servants, members of delegations, anonymous often threatening biblio-historical characters—Black African figures often play auxiliary roles in late medieval Italian images and have likewise been relegated to the margins of scholarship. This paper recenters Black Africans within scholarship by focusing on the Black African figure in Giotto’s the “Mocking of Christ” at the Scrovegni Chapel. Scholarship has tended to read the Black African figure in Giotto’s “Mocking of Christ” in one of two diametrically opposed ways: he is either a sinful character whose moral failings are communicated through his skin color, comportment and physiognomic features, or he is a more positive figure, a person who in Giotto’s naturalistic, empathetic rendering is open to conversion. Neither reading, however, captures the complexities with which medieval people saw blackness and the representation of Black African people. As I show, the Black African figure in the “Mocking of Christ” cannot be reduced to a mere representation of either good or evil, but rather embodies both. I argue that Giotto, drawing on both a hermeneutical understanding of blackness and theories of environmental determinism that related to Black Africans of his time, depicted this Black African figure in a way that communicated sinfulness, while at the same time the African’s placement as a liminal figure and suspended action communicates his potential for conversion and redemption. This paradox, well known in biblical exegesis in the construction of the sinner saint, turns here on both metaphorical and historical significations of blackness. By understanding that the Black African figure would have conveyed both meanings of blackness simultaneously to the viewers of its era, we can begin to recognize how blackness was used strategically in late medieval Italy to enable white Europeans to reflect on their own salvational status: if even this black African might avail himself of Christ’s love and compassion, then so might they. Blackness under the European gaze, in other words, could be used to further Christian ends. But blackness was not merely a mirror in which Europeans saw themselves; it also offered a way for an artist to project an understanding of an entire continent of people. As a multivalent quality, blackness could be deployed to legitimize and support the conversion of Black Africans.
April 17, 11 am, Hagen Room (Elvehjem 150): Workshop on “Approaches to Alterity: Race and Racialization in Late Medieval Italian Art.” The workshop is open to interested graduate students, faculty, staff and undergraduates. Please email Prof. Thomas Dale (tedale@wisc.edu) to reserve a place and receive a copy of the reading.
Although the peninsula of Italy is rarely studied as a locus for race-making in the medieval world, the people and institutions of the kingdoms and city states of late medieval Italy were deeply engaged in the racialization of people. Images attest to this engagement, providing unparalleled insight into the ways difference was managed and meted out. This workshop considers four groups of people who were racialized in images created in Italy during the later Middle Ages: Jews, Muslims, black Africans and Tatars. In these images, members of these groups are placed anachronistically in biblical scenes, represented with telling signs of physiognomic difference, and marked as foreign with indicators such as clothing. By communicating and in turn constructing difference in these subtle yet visually compelling ways, images in late medieval Italy racialized Jews, black Africans and Tatars, portraying them as historical enemies of the Church with indelible and immutable amoral traits. As Michael Camille argued and Pamela Patton has reinforced, images in the Middle Ages did not document reality but rather produced it. In Italy, images did not simply influence race-making; they also constructed easily graspable judgments about human difference that were backed by the authority of history.
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Co-sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program, the Anonymous Fund, Art History, the Center for European Studies, French and Italian, Integrated Liberal Studies, and the Art Department.