The Art of Love

With twenty-one woodcuts, engravings, and etchings from the Ackland's collection, The Art of Love explores notions of romantic love. The works of art are by Dutch, Flemish, French, German, and Italian artists from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, such as Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Durer, and Marcantonio Raimondi. These artists engage with ideas about love rooted in classical antiquity and the European Middle Ages, and allow viewers to consider the extent to which they connect with modern conceptions.

The prints depict subjects including courtship, marriage, illicit relationships, allegorical ideals of love, and narratives about famous pairs like Adam and Eve and Romeo and Juliet. The exhibition organizes them into six groups: Bonds of Love, Rituals of Love, Forbidden Love, Abduction and Deceit, Intimacy and Atmosphere, and Passion and Worldly Love. Raimondi's Angelica and Medoro, for example, shows the lovers from Torquato Tasso's Orlando Furioso in a tender embrace, their entwined arms visually suggesting an emotional bond. Cranach's The Tournament with the Lances offers insights into rituals of courtly love as it parodies medieval jousting tournaments. Jan Saenredam's Evening presents an intimate atmosphere for courtship as flirting couples drink, dine, and listen to music by candle- and moonlight. And French nineteenth-century scenes from Romeo and Juliet demonstrate the enduring appeal of that story of forbidden romance.

Professor Kathryn Starkey, of UNC-Chapel Hill's Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, and the students in her first-year seminar, Love in the Middle Ages, partnered with the Ackland to curate this exhibition. Starkey's course examines the creation and development of the notion of love from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the present day. She and her students interpret the prints from that perspective, demonstrating the ways in which these images illuminate conceptions of love prevalent in past centuries and still current in our own.