Special thanks to Susana Sosa, Rachel Barron Duncan, Nicole Gherry, Kim Richter, and Rachel Miller whose voices and insights are featured here.
This video was made possible thanks to the Macaulay Family Foundation.
[0:00] [music]
Facilitator: [0:03] Was there a work of art that inspired or moved you or changed your life?
Female Participant: [0:09] An artwork that really stopped me in my tracks is Mary Cassatt’s “Lydia in a Loge.” It is an interesting composition. The fact that it was done by a woman artist made me want to explore the idea of gender in art. It made me actually go to Paris and go to the Opéra and sit in a loge box and experience a performance there.
Female Participant: [0:24] I thought I understood Chartres Cathedral. When I saw slides, it really looked like a cathedral on a hill, where there was open air all around it. It was a complete myth, this photograph that I learned from.
[0:36] I was lucky enough to be able to go Chartres, and it was completely surrounded by a city. I realized how integral the cathedral was to the community, because the entire city was built around this central plaza.
[0:48] I think any time I’ve ever seen a work of art in person that I learned first as a slide, I learn something new, and I’m just bowled over.
Female Participant: [0:53] Albrecht Dürer, his “Self-Portrait,” where he kind of looks like Jesus. It really blew my mind that anybody would think so highly of themselves as to put themselves in that position.
[1:03] At the same time, it’s such a gorgeous painting and you see his expertise. You almost think, well, maybe he is right, maybe he should put himself on that pedestal. It is humorous. It’s elegant. That’s the one that really made me look at [a] work in a different way.
Female Participant: [1:17] When I was 13 — this is a few years after the wall came down in Berlin — and we took a trip and saw Nefertiti. I was totally awestruck. She is utterly beautiful and imperfect. She is human and yet she’s thousands of years old.
[1:33] And so to have this vivid image of a powerful woman from the past was something that I think put me on the trajectory of becoming an art historian.
Female Participant: [1:42] A work of art that has changed the way I’ve thought about the past is when I was a freshman undergraduate, I was taught of Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” as being this portrait of a European Renaissance man.
[1:54] Then later on I learned to pay attention to the globe that is on the shelf. I learned to pay attention to the navigation instruments and realized through that work of art [that] the past was an interconnected place in a way that is not exactly the same as our globally connected 21st-century lives, but similar.
[2:13] [music]
