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The Department of Transnational Italian Studies is delighted to announce “Giorgio de Chirico, Albert Barnes, and Philadelphia's Italian Renaissance”, a lecture by art historian , Associate Professor of Italian and Director of the Italian Studies Program at Saint Joseph's University. The event is organized within Luca Zipoli's course “Philadelphia the Global City: The Italian Legacy across Time” (ITAL B240) and is open to all the students enrolled in the class.

Please contact lzipoli@brynmawr.edu for more information.

The event is co-sponsored by the Tri-Co Philly Program and by the Program in Museum Studies. 

Abstract:

Giorgio de Chirico’s 1926 portrait of Albert C. Barnes's emerged from a friendship forged after Barnes began collecting the Italian modernist's paintings. In creating this work de Chirico performed a ritual as old as fifteenth-century Florence: the artist honoring his patron, the patron legitimizing the artist. This talk explores how Barnes—pharmaceutical magnate turned art collector—positioned himself as a twentieth-century patron whose cultural vision rivaled that of Italy's most discerning Renaissance families. By championing de Chirico's work, Barnes created a reciprocal relationship that authenticated both his taste and de Chirico's status as an artist worthy of serious patronage. The portrait's remarkable journey—from Barnes's private residence to its current position at the entrance of the Barnes Foundation reveals how patronage, portraiture, and institutional legacy intertwine. Through this image, we trace connections between twentieth-century Philadelphia and early modern Italy, showing how one Italian artist and one American collector helped establish Philadelphia as a transnational cultural capital where Italian artistic traditions found new expression and enduring influence.

Speaker's bio: 

Kristi Grimes traces how culture travels—over oceans, through centuries, across boundaries between word and image. Associate Professor of Italian and Director of the Italian Studies Program at Saint Joseph's University, she earned her PhD from the University of Chicago, MA from the University of Notre Dame, and BA from the College of the Holy Cross. This award-winning educator designs interdisciplinary courses that bridge Italian Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Art History and Museum Studies. In Rome, where she teaches regularly, she guides students through the city's layered histories. Her scholarship on Trecento art and literature explores Petrarch and the lyric tradition, the interplay of word and image, the iconography of female saints, and the history of humanism. Her work has appeared in The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Diversity in Italian Studies, Italian Culture, Latomus: Revue d'Études Latines, Lectura Petrarce, and The Medieval Feminist Forum.

Tri-Co Philly Program Museum Studies Transnational Italian Studies