Hammer Art History Lecture by Shawon Kinew, “St. Paul Among the Snakes: A Maltese Artist Goes Home, c. 1660”

Abstract: At the end of the 1650s, Melchiorre Cafà, a Maltese sculptor, was newly established in Rome. Rome was the most significant site for sculptural production in Europe at that time. It was also a Golden Age of sculpture as artists vied for papal commissions and pushed the limits of their medium. They transformed hard stone into weightless apparitions. But, in his early days in the Caput Mundi, Cafà returned home conceptually. He carved in the humble material of wood the patron saint of his island, St. Paul, to be sent back to Malta. Today the sculpture is at the center of local devotional practices, still carried in processions celebrating the Apostle’s shipwreck in Malta. Our time is connected to Paul’s and to Cafà’s in this living tradition. A study of Cafà’s St. Paul is one of Mediterranean cultural continuities, and a meditation on the ethnographic gaze of the art historian.

Shawon Kinew is an art historian of early modern Southern Europe at Harvard University and specializes in seventeenth-century Rome’s art and theory. Her research on Roman Baroque sculpture focuses on the Maltese artist Melchiorre Cafà, who is the subject of a book manuscript in preparation, Baroque Softness: Melchiorre Cafà and the Sculpture of Mysticism.

Register to attend in Royce 314

More information about past Hammer Art History Lectures can be found here.