Due to inclement weather, a History of Art Goldberg Lecture by Tara Zanardi has been rescheduled for April 9. The lecture by Zanardi, an assistant professor of art history at Hunter College, was originally set for Feb. 19. During her rescheduled Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History at Cohen Hall, Zanardi will address “Porcelain Pleasures and the Allure of the East: Charles III and China.” Her talk will begin at 4:10 p.m. in Room 203, with a reception to follow in the atrium. “Tara Zanardi’s scholarly interests engage the art and visual culture of Spain and its global empire during the long 18th century,” said Christopher Johns, the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt.
Zanardi, who earned her doctorate at the University of Virginia, teaches courses on 18th- and 19th-century European art that considers a wide range of topics–art and politics, the development of museums, national identities and cultural representations, fashion, gender and global exchange.
She has published widely in a number of scholarly journals, including Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and has received numerous fellowships. Her first book, Majismo and the Pictorial Construction of Elite Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Penn State University Press) will appear later this year.
Johns said that her new book project, Global Exchange and Tropical Play: Chinerìa in Spanish Visual and Material Culture, focuses on “the deployment of colonial exoticisms in Spain and its empire, attempting to understand in the political and artistic context why certain artistic choices were made and others avoided.”
Zanardi will explore the highly fashionable and exotic 18th-century decorative mode of chinoiserie in primarily two major sites, the royal palaces of Madrid and Aranjuez. It will be the first in-depth analysis of chinoiserie in Spanish interior design, textiles and decorative arts.
The Goldberg Lecture, sponsored by the Department of History of Art, is free and open to the public. Limited parking is available in Lot 95 by Cohen Hall. For more information, call 615-322-2831.
Fay Renardson contributed to this story.