Works-in-Progress session: “Revelatory Lines: Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s Monotypes, 1637–1655”

Presented by Drew Erin Becker Lash, Ph.D. Student, University of California, Los Angeles

Hosted by the Early Modern Research Group

To register for this event, please email the Early Modern Research Group.

This presentation examines a small number of works on paper by the seventeenth-century Genoese artist, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. Exploring his experimental handling of materials, together with contemporary engagement with nocturnal themes and with the limits of vision, this talk will shed light on the dynamics of this unusual group of religious images.

Drew Erin Becker Lash is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at UCLA. She previously earned masters’ degrees at Columbia University in Art History in 2018, and at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Estudios Artísticos, Literarios, y de la Cultura in 2016. She completed her bachelor’s degree at Johns Hopkins in Art History and International Studies in 2014. Most recently, she worked as a Research Associate at the Art Institute of Chicago in the European Painting and Sculpture department. Her doctoral research will focus on the painting of the wider Hapsburg Empire in the seventeenth century, concentrating primarily on that of Spain and Italy. She has held internships at The Frick Collection, the Museo Nacional del Prado, LACMA, and The Phillips Collection.

Image: Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, The Nativity with Angels and God the Father, mid-1650s, monotype, 36.8 x 25.0 cm, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.