Schmitter to Host New Book Talk on ‘The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy: Andrea Odoni and his Venetian Palace’

Join the conversation on the latest writing, research and work of the faculty of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA) at UMass Amherst on Thursday, Feb. 17 at 6 p.m. Monika Schmitter, professor and chair of the History of Art and Architecture Department, will be joined by Patricia Fortini Brown, Princeton University; David Young Kim, University of Pennsylvania; and Jessica Maier, Mount Holyoke College; to discuss her latest book “The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy: Andrea Odoni and his Venetian Palace.” Barbara Krauthamer, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, will offer welcoming remarks. Those wishing to attend can register via Zoom.

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Monika Schmitter is a specialist in Italian art of the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth century with an emphasis on the material culture and built environment of Venice. She is particularly interested in portraiture, patronage, domestic art and architecture, gender and class issues, and the history of collecting.

Panelists:

Patricia Fortini Brown, professor emeritus, department of art and archaeology, Princeton University. She is the author most recently of “The Venetian Bride: Bloodlines and Blood Feuds in Venice and the Venetian Empire.”

David Young Kim, associate professor, department of art, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style.”

Jessica Maier, associate professor and chair, department of art history, Mount Holyoke College. Her most recent book is entitled “The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps.”

Sponsors are the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, department of history, department of classics, Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.

“The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy: Andrea Odoni and his Venetian Palace”

Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of Andrea Odoni is one of the most famous paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Son of an immigrant and a member of the non-noble citizen class, Odoni understood how the power of art could make a name for himself and his family in his adopted homeland. Far from emulating Venetian patricians, however, he set himself apart through the works he collected and the way he displayed them. In this book, Monika Schmitter imaginatively reconstructs Odoni's house—essentially a ‘portrait’ of Odoni through his surroundings and possessions. Schmitter's detailed analysis of Odoni's life and portrait reveals how sixteenth-century individuals drew on contemporary ideas about spirituality, history and science to forge their own theories about the power of things and the agency of objects. She shows how Lotto's painting served as a meta-commentary on the practice of collecting and on the ability of material things to transform the self.