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Thanks to the University of Wolverhampton for hosting this event.

SUE MAY: Political spin in a Mantuan altarpiece: the image of St George in Mantegna's Madonna della Vittoria and a Hungarian woodcut print?

Andrea Mantegna’s Madonna della Vittoria (1496) was painted to commemorate the so-called ‘victory’ at the Battle of Fornovo, into which Francesco II Gonzaga had led an army against the French King Charles VIII. It has gone unnoticed that Saint George in the altarpiece bears some resemblance to a woodcut representation of János Hunyadi (c.1407-56)—a much-celebrated military commander—that appears in János Thuróczy’s Chronica Hungarorum (1488). This paper considers why Mantegna may have superimposed the likeness of this near-contemporaneous, mid-European historical figure onto the holy figure of St George.

SUE is an art and design historian, andtakes an interdisciplinary approach, exploring in particular the interface between theology and local, national and international politics. Chronologically, her research centres on the visual culture of the late-fifteenth/early-sixteenth centuries. She has published detailed analyses of paintings, sculpture and architecture in Italian cities.

JOHANNA HOLMES A valiant endeavour: supporting Victorian women into regular work in printed illustration.

This talk traces the history of successive initiatives by the (Royal) Female School of Art in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, to support students in finding viable, regular work in the commercial ‘by-ways of art’. Hardly acknowledged at the time, and not studied since, this history, over a period of fifty years from 1860 to 1910 demonstrates a consistent mission to enable talented young women to become financially independent, if they so wished. However limited the success rate (and how do we define ‘success’?) the story offers insights into the effects of contemporary social, cultural and economic values on the workplace, and on career opportunities for women.

JOHANNA is a historian of women’s commercial engagement with the nineteenth-century workplace, focusing on careers which required technical training, personal agency and entrepreneurial ingenuity – all characteristics in direct conflict with the popular ideal of self-effacing feminine virtue. Her doctoral dissertation, “To use our talents and improve them”: women’s careers in the London art world, 1820-1860, was completed in 2020 and has fuelled further research into women training and working at the intersection of Victorian values and commercial preconceptions.