The Annual Olszewski Lecture in Early Modern Art: Renaissance Architectural Drawing in the Expanded Field

Guest speaker: Dr. Morgan Ng, Yale University

Current scholarship on Renaissance drawing focuses overwhelmingly on works on paper. This concern with medium specificity overlooks the reality that designs for buildings and other artworks in the period were executed in a vast range of mediums, contexts, and dimensions. Architectural drawings were regularly incised or traced in full scale with chalk on walls and floors. Ground plans and elevations were composed, often directly on the construction site, out of rope and string. Early modern writings abounded with stories of young artists who doodled on the ground and on rock faces, or who invented new imagery by gazing at the veins of marble revetment and the splotches on dirt-stained walls. This lecture explores the symbolic and experiential implications of this expanded understanding of graphic creation. Reception to follow the lecture.

File Attachments: 2026_OlszewskiLecture

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