JILL BURKE – Art Historian | Author | HISTORICAL CONSULTANT

This is the text of a lecture I gave for a conference to consider the Titian: Love, Desire and Death exhibition at the National Gallery, London. If you’d prefer this in video form, you can see a recording of the lecture on YouTube. There’s a lot of rape imagery in art museums – the rape […]

Time is a terribly scarce commodity for those of us who spend our skills and labour equally on our families and our own work.Laura Cereta, Letter to Sigismondo de’ Bucci, 1486 It seems terribly modern, doesn’t it, a woman complaining about trying to do (“our own”) intellectual work whilst being constantly pulled back to domestic […]

My colleagues and I have been each asked to choose an object that made us “#hookedonarthistory for the University of Edinburgh’s History of Art department’s social media account. It’s a lovely, fun thing with some brilliant answers from my colleagues, so I hesitated before choosing Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà. There are two reasons. Firstly, it is […]

Pontormo drew himself naked whilst escaping from the plague. For a few months in 1523-4 he was holed up in a Carthusian Monastery, the Certosa di Galluzzo, a few miles outside Florence. The first intimations of a wave of plague had come in August 1522, when five officials were appointed to protect Florence from the […]

These thoughts about Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia came about during a discussion at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (UK) for the wonderful Behind the Scenes at the Museum podcast. Thanks to Tiffany Jenkins, Luke Syson and Michael Savage for our conversation – worth getting up at 4am for! I should also warn readers that given the […]

How long do we spend looking at things? Really looking? Early modern women were often urged to be patient, and their skills of slow, close and acute observation can be seen in their naturalistic representation of nature in a variety of media (painting, drawing, needlework and more). The text below derives from a class exercise in […]

Half-smiling, half-naked, her fingers more suggestive than concealing (the risqué”v” of her left hand! The slight give where her index finger presses the soft skin of her breast!), this woman’s warm relationship with the viewer is far from the icy profiles of the fancy high society women portrayed by, say, Domenico Ghirlandaio, or the sometimes […]

This is adapted from a lecture I gave at the book launch of The Italian Renaissance Nude. Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, 26 June 2018. As a middle-aged, white, art historian from Leeds, I don’t get compared to Beyoncé as often as I’d like. However, against the odds, I’m going to argue today there’s a […]

 I am, perhaps, the only person to see Blade Runner 2049 who was constantly reminded of book 3 of Baldassare Castiglione’s Courtier. It wasn’t the replicants that did it, but the artificially intelligent hologram super-girl, Joi (Ana de Armas), who the hero, Office K (Ryan Gosling) keeps in a device in his pocket and when he […]

On 27 February 1639 King Philip IV of Spain received a letter from his brother Ferdinand about Rubens’ Judgement of Paris (above). The story of the Judgment of Paris was often represented in early modern texts and images. It’s the one where three Olympian goddesses  – Hera, Athena and Aphrodite – compete to be judged the most beautiful […]

I couldn’t resist sharing these thoughts on body hair removal from a  Venetian 1562 advice book for women that I stumbled across yesterday (apparently written by a “Greek Queen”, but really by the male physician, Giovanni Marinello). You would have thought that having to deal with scabies, leprosy and “the itch” would have taken up […]

How to see naked men Seeing naked or near-naked men in the Renaissance does not seem to have been very difficult. I should point out that looking at naked people is not, necessarily, erotic. Indeed, the word for naked, nudo, in Italian had pejorative connotations, as suggested by the definition of “nudo” in John Florio’s […]