UVM professor Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio will explain how art influenced politics in Renaissance Florence in a talk at St. Johnsbury Athenaeum on December 7 at 7:00 pm. Her talk, “The Medici Grand Dukes: Art and Politics in Renaissance Florence,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public.

Professor Di Dio will consider how, despite scandals and even murder, the Medici Grand Dukes maintained their power and prominence for nearly two centuries by giving gifts of art by the great Florentine masters to kings, popes, and emperors.

Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Vermont.  She is a specialist of Italian and Spanish sculpture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; her research has been supported by fellowships from the Ministry of Arts and Culture of Spain, the Kress Foundation, the Medici Archive Project, and Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies “Villa I Tatti.”  In addition to many articles and essays, she has published several books: Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance, Sculpture Collections in Early Modern Spain (with Rosario Coppel), Leone Leoni: Faith and Fame (with Rosario Coppel), and Making and Moving Sculptures in Early Modern Italy.  She has lectured at the Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Wallace Collection, London, the Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, Ferrara, Italy, as well as at numerous conferences across Europe and North America.

Read more about the First Wednesdays series Here.