The Daily Bulletin Archive

Frances Gage, assistant professor of fine arts, will share her research as part of the Year of the City Emerging Scholar series on Friday, February 8, from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. in E. H. Butler Library 210. This series of presentations provides faculty members with an opportunity to share their intellectual work with the rest of the campus.

Gage notes that to speak of Rome during the Catholic Reformation is to conjure up a picture of a city under construction, of building projects designed to materialize the grandeur of papal families and a triumphant Catholic Church, of broad new avenues with dramatic vistas and plazas with theatrical fountains, and, of course, of the imposing architectural structures of Bernini and Borromini. Rome stood unchallenged as the artistic capital of Europe, the longed-for destination of artists and intellectuals across northern and southern Europe. Overlooked, however, is its place within the early modern European imagination as a center for every form of health care for mind and body. Studying the perceived benefits of varied technologies of healing in this period prompts both a reappraisal of Rome’s significance in the early modern period and a reconsideration of twenty-first-century attitudes toward civic health and wellness.