Talks & Conversations

The Confounding Glance: Meraviglia, Attraction, and the Invention of Love at First Sight

Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art

Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520–1523, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

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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.

Emanuele Lugli

Associate Professor, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University

Emanuele Lugli researches and writes about the late medieval and early modern world—its paintings, its trading cities, its clothing. His work moves between history and theory, circling questions of scale, labor, eroticism, and the persistence of old ideas that continue to shape the present in invisible ways. His most recent publications include Lavinia’s Wondrous Portraits (2025), a children’s book, and Measuring the Renaissance: An Introduction (2023), the final volume in a trilogy on the history of measurement.

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A young boy with pink and tan-colored skin stands next to a seated woman with an ashen white face, and both look out at us in this vertical portrait painting. The scene is created with broad areas of mottled color in rust and coral red, pale pink, lilac purple, ivory white, and shades of tawny brown. The eyes of both people are heavily outlined with large, dark pupils. To our right, the woman’s pale, oval face is surrounded by a muted, mint-green cloth that covers her hair and wraps across her neck. Her eyes are outlined with charcoal gray, and her heavy lids shaded under arched brows with smoky, plum purple. She has a straight nose, and her burgundy-red lips are closed in a straight line. Her long, rose-pink dress is lavender purple below the knee, and is scrubbed with darker pink strokes across her lap. Her sleeves are tan on the upper arms and cream white on the forearm, over two blush-pink forms that represent her hands resting on her thighs. Along the top of her shoulders, her dress is terracotta red. A rectangular, fog-gray form behind her could be a chair or a half-wall, the top edge of which is higher to our right of her head. To our left, the boy has dark brown, short hair over putty pink, protruding ears. The area between his eyelid and arched brow is filled in with chocolate brown, giving his staring eyes a hooded look. His jawline, chin, and lips are outlined with dark brown. His khaki-brown, knee-length coat has pale, rose-pink sleeves and a black collar. An area of pale, ice blue could be a kerchief or high-collared shirt, and he wears fawn-brown pants. One of his slippers is coffee brown and the other, closer to the woman, is slate gray. He holds a loosely painted, pale, turquoise-blue object in one hand at his waist. The pair are situated against a background painted in areas of coral, ruby, crimson, and wine red. Two vertical, concrete-gray strips behind the boy and woman could be columns. The floor along the bottom edge of the painting is pale pink.

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