Lecture | Titian Transformed: New insights on the DIA's recently treated Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes

Tuesday, May 6 at 6:00 PM
In-Person and Virtual Lecture*
Advance registration is required

The Institute of Fine Arts
1 East 78th Street, New York, NY 10075
and Online

Paintings of a certain age bear physical evidence of the ways in which cultural heritage is continuously in flux. Materials change as they age. The way a painting looks can be altered to accord with the shifting tastes of its owners, or because repairs were required. Artworks change hands, and with them location and function. They can also contain alterations that occurred during their making, either from decisions by their maker or wider transformations taking place within a culture.

Thanks to generous support from the TEFAF Museum Restoration Fund, Titian's Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (ca. 1570) underwent long-awaited conservation in 2019. Examination of this newly-cleaned work has not only revealed the complex and nuanced ways in which Titian executed this painting, but also prompted intriguing questions of how its many lives intersect with its current place in the galleries of the Detroit Institute of Art.

Ellen Hanspach-Bernal is a 2006 graduate of the art conservation program at the University of Fine Arts, Dresden. From 2006 to 2009, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in painting conservation at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. She has worked for the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Conservation Center for the Museums of the City of Erfurt in Thuringia, Germany. Hanspach-Bernal has been the Paintings Conservator at the Detroit Institute of Arts since 2015, where her work focuses on preserving, researching, and treating paintings from antiquity to the present. She also supervises and teaches postgraduate fellows, preparing a new generation of conservators for work in a museum environment. She has published most recently on a Roman-period funerary portrait, on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and on Max Ernst's Surrealist painting techniques.

*The program will be presented onsite at the James B. Duke House and live-streamed. Please note we have transitioned from Zoom to a new, web-based live-streaming platform for our events. You can now access our public programs directly through your browser. Kindly RSVP below to receive the link.
 

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