There is a particular drama in the way the Italian imagination has pictured love’s arrival.

Dante looks at Beatrice and is starstruck. Petrarch spirals into a labyrinth at the sight of Laura. Tasso’s knights, on encountering Armida, lose not only their composure but their sanity. 

In these accounts, love does not grow; it takes. This talk considers the way early modern Italy lingered in that instant of disorientation—what had already been called “love at first sight”—and explores how it offered a framework for thinking about attraction, emotions, the divine, and the mysterious pull of art itself.

This is the 29th annual Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art, named after the esteemed specialist of Italian art Sydney J. Freedberg (1914–1997), who served as chief curator of the National Gallery of Art from 1983 to 1988.

This program is coordinated by the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.