Sydney J. Freedberg Lectures on Italian Art

The Freedberg Lecture, held since 1997, features distinguished scholars presenting innovative research. The program is 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.

Upcoming

We will announce information about the fall Freedberg Lecture in summer 2025.

Recent

Watch lecture recordings

View the series playlist

2024 :  Blood Joining Blood: The Immersive in Caravaggio’s Malta

Keith Sciberras, University of Malta

2023 :  Sofonisba Anguissola: Recent Discoveries and Debates

Michael Cole, Columbia University

A woman and two children, all with pale skin and flushed cheeks, sit together in a landscape in this round painting. The woman takes up most of the composition as she sits with her right leg, to our left, tucked under her body. Her other leg, on our right, is bent so the foot rests on the ground, and that knee angles up and out to the side. She wears a rose-pink dress under a topaz-blue robe, and a finger between the pages of a closed book holds her place. Her brown hair is twisted away from her face. She has delicate features and her pink lips are closed. She looks and leans to our left around a nude young boy who half-sits and half-stands against her bent leg. The boy has blond hair and pudgy, toddler-like cheeks and body. The boy reaches his right hand, on our left, to grasp the tall, thin cross held by the second young boy, who sits on the ground next to the pair. This second boy has darker brown hair and wears a garment resembling animal fur. The boy kneels facing the woman and looks up at her and the blond boy. The trio sits on a flat, grassy area in front of a body of water painted light turquoise. Mountains in the deep distance are pale azure blue beneath a nearly clear blue sky.

2022 :  Michelangelo, Raphael, and the Genius Paradox

Cammy Brothers, Northeastern University

2021 :  “More perfect and excellent than men”: The Women Artists of Bologna

Babette Bohn, Texas Christian University

2020 :  Telling the Past Differently: Italian Renaissance Art in the Hands of the Beholder

Megan Holmes, University of Michigan

Past lectures

Andrea Mantegna’s Stones, Caves, and Clouds (2019)
Gabriele Finaldi, National Gallery, London

Against Titian (2018)
Stephen J. Campbell, Johns Hopkins University

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice? Titian’s Portrait of Clarice Strozzi (2017)
Beverly Louise Brown, The Warburg Institute

The Aesthetics of Water: Wellheads, Cisterns, and Fountains in the Venetian Dominion (2016)
Patricia Fortini Brown, Princeton University

Canova and Color (2015)
David Bindman, University College London

Venice 1548: Titian Looking at Tintoretto’s Miracle of the Slave (2014)
Miguel Falomir, Museo Nacional del Prado

Circa 1515: Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo (2013)
Carmen C. Bambach, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Not a painting, but a Vision!”: Raphael's Sistine Madonna Turns Five Hundred (2012)
Andreas Henning, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

Bernard Berenson and Lorenzo Lotto (2011)
Carl Brandon Strehlke, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Thoughts on the Caravaggisti (2010)
Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University

Ghiberti and the Painters of Florence (2009)
Keith Christiansen, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

To Live with Myths in Pompeii and Beyond (2008)
Paul Zanker, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa

Aunt Gertrude to Sydney J. Freedberg: My Provenance (2007)
Bruce Cole, National Endowment for the Humanities

Modernity is Old: The Landscape of Italy as Seen by the Painters of the Early Nineteenth Century (2006)
Anna Ottani Cavina, Università di Bologna

Illuminated Choral Manuscripts of the Italian Renaissance (2005)
Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

The Third Italian Renaissance: Art of the Lombard Plain (2004)
Charles Dempsey, Johns Hopkins University

Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the Art of the Renaissance and Baroque Masters (2003)
Paul Barolsky, University of Virginia

The Turning Figure (2002)
Nicholas Penny, National Gallery of Art

Michelangelo and the Medici (2001)
Caroline Elam, The Burlington Magazine, London

The Fashioning of a Public Persona: Duchess Eleonora di Toledo’s Ceremonial Dress and Her Portraits by Bronzino (2000)
Janet Cox-Rearick, City University of New York

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (1999)
James S. Ackerman, Harvard University (emeritus)

A Carpaccio Masterpiece Rediscovered (1998)
William R. Rearick, University of Maryland (emeritus)

The Young Michelangelo (1997)
Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

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The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts is the National Gallery’s research institute. 

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