Evelyn Lincoln, Kress-Beinecke Professor and HIAA Professor Emerita delivered the colloquium “Wood Work: The Parasole Woodblock Carvers in Early Modern Rome” at the National Gallery of Art on September 25, 2025 to celebrate the beginning of our 46th fellowship year.
In spite of humanist pronouncements that pictures were intended for children and the illiterate, flagship publications of the most powerful new institutions in early modern Rome used them to persuade readers and communicate important information. Authors of erudite treatises on botany and antiquity, liturgical texts, and how-to manuals, relied on pictures to present their evidence convincingly and give life to religious narratives. Leonardo (d.1612) and Girolama Parasole (d.1622) carved woodcut illustrations for books in virtually every publication genre of the period, and were therefore involved in giving visual form to the research of varied groups of erudite and ambitious authors. Their work gives us a window onto often invisible aspects of making pictures, allowing us to see how, at the moment it began to change, the traditional organization of work and family provided structures flexible enough to navigate transformations that would eventually shape the conduct of the arts more broadly.