Lecture: Mirror of Eternity: The Croce Dipinta and the Franciscans Between Medieval and Renaissance, Holly Flora, at Boston College, 23 Sept. 2025 6-7pm and reception

The Annual Josephine von Henneberg Lecture in Italian Art

Mirror of Eternity: The Croce Dipinta and the Franciscans Between Medieval and Renaissance

Professor Holly Flora

Tuesday, September 23

6:00–7:00 pm, with reception to follow

McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA

Free; Open to the public; McMullen Museum of Art, 2101 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 111

The McMullen Museum and the Art, Art History & Film Department welcome Holly Flora, Professor of Art History at Tulane University, whose work sheds new light on the legendary artist Cimabue, revealing his sophisticated engagement with complicated intellectual and theological ideas about materials, memory, beauty, and experience. 

Holly Flora's scholarly work explores the themes of narrative, imagination, materiality, and gender in the devotional art of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy. Flora authored The Devout Belief of the Imagination: the Paris Meditationes Vitae Christi and Female Franciscan Spirituality in Trecento Italy (Brepols, 2009) and was recently awarded the Premio San Francesco from the Pontifical University of Saint Anthony (Antonianum) in Rome for her book Cimabue and the Franciscans (Brepols, 2018). She is also co-editor, along with Sarah S. Wilkins, of Art and Experience in Trecento Italy: Studies from the Andrew Ladis Memorial Conference in New Orleans, and is co-editor of the book series Trecento Forum. She is also co-editor with Peter Toth of The Meditationes Vitae Christi Recosidered: New Perspectives on Text and Image (Brepols, 2021). Her articles have appeared in a number of journals, including Gesta, Ikon, Studies in Iconography, Art History, and I Tatti Studies, as well as several edited volumes of essays. She has received a number of research fellowships, including awards from the American Association of University Women, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, the Samuel Kress Foundation, and the International Center of Medieval Art. In 2010-11 she was appointed the Millicent Mercer Johnsen Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies at the American Academy in Rome and in 2015-16 she was the Jean-Francois Malle Fellow at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Co-sponsored by the Art, Art History, & Film Department and the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College

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