Thursday, April 25 at 6:00pm to 8:00pm. Gasson Hall, Room 305, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. This talk will tell the story of how one hundred illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy by the Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) went missing for hundreds of years, and how their dramatic acquisition for the newly unified German nation by the art historian Walter Lippmann in 1882 contributed to the creation of what we now call “the Renaissance.”

It will discuss the cultural, social, and political factors surrounding the mysterious disappearance of Botticelli’s illustrations, and then connect their nineteenth-century discovery to such key events as the emergence of the Renaissance in European historiography, the birth of the artistic “connoisseur,” and the fate of Europe’s artistic heritage during the Cold War.