This paper investigates the contexts in which the image of a heart-shaped object could be used in order to evoke a range of different meanings. Human love and magic, divine love and faith, the passion of Christ and the sorrows of the Virgin Mary are some of the most prominent associations invoked by the heart in the early modern period and beyond. The heart can also be used in a more allegorical context to signify wrath and envy. Thus the heart is often employed as a symbol for compassion (or lack of compassion), a tradition that continued well into the modern period as Wilhelm Hauff’s novel Cold Heart and other literary texts convey.

Dagmar Eichberger is part of an EU-funded research project, Artifex, at the University of Trier and is Professor in the Department of Fine Arts in Heidelberg. With Charles Zika she edited Dürer and his Culture (1998). She is the author of Leben mit Kunst – Wirken durch Kunst (2002), and has edited several books on women and the arts in early modern Europe including: Women of Distinction. Margaret of York and Margaret of Austria (2005) and Women at the Burgundian Court (with Anne-Marie Legaré). Her forthcoming publication Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe: Continuity and Expansion (edited with Shelley Perlove).

Date: Thursday 17 September 2015, 6:15pm - 7:30pm

Venue: Singapore Theatre, Basement, Melbourne School of Design, (Architecture), Bld 133, The University of Melbourne, Parkville

Free to attend.

Registrations http://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/eichbergerdagmar