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The Art of the Courtesan in Renaissance Italy: A conversation with Sarah Dunant

Updated: 15 minutes ago

Special Free Event! To get the Invitation, please send an email to Paola50122@gmail.com


Saturday, December 14th Live on Zoom

7pm Italy, 10am Los Angeles, 1pm New York


       


This lovely young woman was painted by Titian in 1534 in Venice. She is the first naked woman in the history of post Christian art to be looking directly at the viewer.  Aren't I lovely? She seems to be saying. How would you like to know me better?  Though the painting is now known as The Venus of Urbino, the model was actually a courtesan.

In an age where the church demanded celibacy from the men who worked for it and where rich high-class men married late to virginal women they were not expected to be faithful to, where did all that excess male desire go? The answer is courtesans: women as cultured, clever and fashionable as they were lovely.   

 Beginning in Rome where courtesan culture flourished under a corrupt church, this sumptuously illustrated lecture charts how with the sack of the city in 1527 many of its most successful courtesans fled to that other great hub of renaissance art, beauty, excess and sexual hypocrisy, Venice, a journey Sarah originally brought to life in her critically acclaimed, best-selling novel “ In the Company of the Courtesan.”   


Special Free Event!

To get the invite, please send an email to Paola50122@gmail.com



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