Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe

Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe offers new scholarly commentary on the private lives and desires of Renaissance individuals, examining depictions of desire, violence, and virtue that both shaped and subverted gender roles and expectations. Significantly, the exhibition emphasizes women’s experiences as makers, viewers, and owners of artworks. Based on the premise that women were disenfranchised but not disengaged, the exhibition moves beyond studies of famous individuals who are treated as unconventional. Instead, Lust, Love, and provides fresh insights into early modern women’s artistic and cultural accomplishments, overturning the notion that such engagement was available or appealing only to a select few.

The exhibition curator, Nora Lambert, is a Max Planck Fellow in Art History at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and has held curatorial positions at numerous museums in the United States and Italy. As the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, Nora organized the first iteration of Lust, Love, and Loss in 2021. This new version, reconceived and expanded in collaboration with IA&A, turns to women’s literary and epistolary culture for evidence of artistic engagement and draws on the expertise of art, literary, and social historians from multiple US institutions.

The exhibition brings together approximately 40 artworks from collections across the United States. It is notably multimedia exhibition and will include paintings, sculpture, prints, rare books, decorative arts, and textiles. These works are grouped into four sections: “At Home in the Renaissance,” “The Realm of Venus,” “On the Worth of Women,” and “Morality and Mortality.” Each section will include extensive curatorial commentary, which will be augmented by audio and video content on IA&A’s Bloomberg Connects digital guide. Lust, Love and Loss has been generously supported by a 2025 Samuel H. Kress Foundation award.

Please contact Nicole Byers for more information and bookings.