Floor Talk: Witchcraft and the Scapegoating of Disaster
Albrecht Durer, The Four Witches, 1497. National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest.
Professor Charles Zika will speak on the images of witches and witchcraft in the NGV exhibition The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster. The exhibition presents images of death and disaster in prints, illuminated manuscripts, illustrated books and paintings from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. This was a period of great turmoil in Europe, during which bitter religious conflict, war, famine and pestilence generated deep anxiety. Dramatic events and natural disasters were increasingly read as divine punishments or warnings that the Last Days were imminent.
The works in this exhibition are drawn from the Prints & Drawings collection of the NGV and include key loans from the State Library of Victoria and the Special Collections of the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.
Charles Zika is one of the curators of the exhibition and a Professorial Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence, History of Emotions, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne.
Date: 12:30pm, November 30th.
Venue: Robert Raynor Gallery Prints & Drawings, Level 3, NGV International, 180 St Kilda Road
Free entry