About the discussion
The conference series presented in connection with the exhibition Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks, was developed in collaboration with Itay Sapir, Professor of Art History at Université du Québec à Montréal.
About the speakers
Chloé M. Pelletier is Curator of European Art (before 1800) at the MMFA. Originally from Texas, she has held positions in universities and prominent museums in the United States, including the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to joining the MMFA, she was Curatorial Associate in the Art Institute’s Department of Painting and Sculpture of Europe. She has, among other projects, contributed to exhibitions on the sculpture of Antonio Canova and Camille Claudel. Most recently, she curated Spotlight: Women Artists in the Early Modern European Art Collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Pelletier holds a Master’s and a PhD from the University of Chicago specialized in Italian Renaissance painting with secondary fields in environmental studies and arts of the early modern Atlantic world. Her essays and articles have notably been published in the exhibition catalogues Camille Claudel (Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty) and Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) as well as in the journal postmedieval.
Itay Sapir has been Professor of Art History at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) since 2012. A specialist of European art from the 15th to 17th centuries, he has numerous publications focusing on artists such as Caravaggio, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Jusepe de Ribera. His research also examines the links between painting on the one hand and philosophy, science and politics on the other. Itay is a frequent contributor of articles and exhibition reviews in Quebec cultural magazines.
Denis Ribouillault is Full Professor of Early Modern Art History at the Université de Montréal. He specializes in 15th- to 18th-century European art and culture, particularly in Italy and Northern Europe, with a focus on cultural landscapes and gardens and on the intersection between art, science and literature. He has received fellowships from the Villa I Tatti (Harvard), the Villa Médicis – Académie de France à Rome, and the Dumbarton Oaks Institute in Washington D.C. (Harvard). In 2024, he was awarded the Panofsky Professorship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich and the Chaire Montaigne at the Université de Bordeaux. His numerous publications include the recent The Villa Barbaro at Maser: Science, Philosophy, and the Family in Venetian Renaissance Art (Harvey Miller, 2023) and Gardens and Academies in Early Modern Italy and Beyond (Brill, 2024).
Chriscinda Henry is Associate Professor of Art History at McGill University. She specializes in the arts of Renaissance Europe, with particular focus on Venice and North Italy, and is the author of Playful Pictures: Art, Leisure, and Entertainment in the Venetian Renaissance Home (Penn State, 2022), and co-editor of Music and Visual Culture in Renaissance Italy (Routledge, 2023). Her past publications have examined Italian Renaissance courtesans as tastemakers, cultural brokers, and liminal social figures; the visual culture of street singers in the Netherlands and Italy; and the popularity of the pastoral genre in the art, music, and theater of the late 15th and early 16th centuries in North Italy. Current research projects include a book on the cultural history of the buffoon—a virtuoso comic entertainer—in Renaissance Italy and an article on the history of collecting focused on the development of specialized music rooms in 16th-century Venice.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Location: Maxwell Cummings Auditorium, 1379-A, Sherbrooke Street West
Reservation terms: Please note that seat reservations are held until the beginning of the event. Once the activity has started, any unoccupied seats will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis.
