Before the start of her new 92U course, Art and Culture of Renaissance Venice, Mount Holyoke Art History professor and recent NEH fellowship recipient Dr. Jessica Maier talked with us about her passion for art and for spreading that passion through her popular 92U classes, her latest book, The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps, and the surprise reveal of where she lives.
Your first 92U course, Rome: Reinvention and the Eternal City, was among the very first offerings when 92Y launched this new destination for online learning last fall. The course proved so popular with students that you followed it with another on Renaissance Florence, and are about to begin a third on Renaissance Venice. Please talk a bit about your experience teaching beyond your college classroom with these online classes for lifelong learners everywhere.
Teaching these courses has been such a pleasure! Before I taught college and when I was a grad student, I was a tour guide in Rome. I worked for a wonderful organization that wasn’t a tour company in the traditional sense, but employed people like me — ex-pat grad students and budding experts in their field. It was the best teaching preparation I could have had, because it involved small groups of people with a love for a particular topic, looking for an in-depth experience with an expert. Professors can get caught up in the minutae of their expertise, and I learned an incredibly valuable lesson early on, which was to make the material I’m presenting accessible and alive so that people really connect and engage with it — something of particular importance now in the online format. In teaching these 92U courses, I find myself going back to that early experience. Students in these classes are not looking to fulfill an academic requirement, but to fuel their love and knowledge of the subject. I’m met with a kind of enthusiasm that is so wonderful and refreshing. (And teaching where there isn’t an exam involved offers all of the fun with none of the anxiety!)
Italy! Art! What a wondrous world you inhabit! Why do you think these have — for centuries — been among the great passions for people all over the world?
There is a very rightful push now to look across the globe at different cultures, including many that haven’t received the attention they deserve. Italy is a place that has been revered since ancient times. In fact, Rome was already a travel magnet 2000 years ago. Why does Italy have the status other places with incredibly rich cultures don’t? I think our ongoing fascination can be explained by the unbroken time span of Italian cities like Rome — its recorded history and amazing monuments from across time and the enormous influence of the culture. We can and should look far and wide for artistic expression, but Italy will always hold an allure all its own.
Having researched Italy and its art and culture so extensively, do you continue to make new discoveries yourself? Is there a particular work of art in Venice that especially captivates you?
I lived in Venice for a summer right after college, and one of the most extraordinary discoveries for me while there was the island of Torcello — It was like entering a different world. There is a medieval basilica there with some of the most important mosaics of the Byzantine era — the time when the Byzantine Greek world was deeply connected to Venice and vice versa. You find this amazing cultural crossroads. In the beginning of the Middle Ages, Venice was the most connected city on the Italian peninsula — connected throughout the Mediterranean world. So you have examples there of some of the earliest artworks in all of Venice — the mosaics are just mind-blowing. They are incredibly well preserved, and they tell you a lot about what Venetian life was like — how cosmopolitan it was from its earliest times. We think we’ve cornered the market on “globalism,” but globalism goes back a very, very long way.
Please tell us a bit about what students can expect in this upcoming dive into Venice in the Renaissance. How do you begin to capture the many riches of the city, its art and its history in a three-part course?
What I try to do first is to bring the atmosphere of this very unique city alive and set the stage for the artistic treasures it holds. Venice’s atmosphere is utterly unique. There’s really no other place like it in the world — its qualities, its light, its totally manmade topography as a city built on water — its completely unreal — like a fantasy. So I try to bring that to life from afar, then focus on themes that help us understand how humans have molded that environment — how unique the artistic culture has been and how it all relates back to the unique atmosphere of the city.
Your latest book tells the story of Rome’s extraordinary history through its maps — the first English-language book to do so. We generally think of maps as reflective of a city or region’s physical state and development, but you also use them to reveal something greater about Rome’s evolution, its power shifts and more. How did you become interested in this perspective, and how does the examination of maps and prints deepen our understanding of a culture and its history?
I have been interested in maps since right after college — my first job was at an antique map gallery in New York City. I worked there for years, including when I was in grad school, and I gained knowledge I was able to use in my grad school research. I came to realize that maps — especially from before the modern era, and Renaissance maps in particular — function a lot like works of art. They exist not necessarily to tell you facts, but to tell you ideas or perspectives or opinions. We tend to think of maps as objective documents, but as my research kept showing, they could have an agenda. They could be a platform for artistic expression or propaganda or even complete fiction. So for me, maps are more interesting the less objective they are, because they tell you more about the culture they came from.
In December 2019, you opened your inbox to find an email from the National Endowment for the Humanities with the news that you’d been awarded a fellowship. Can you tell us what that was like, and the work you are now doing as a result of the fellowship?
The news came just shortly before the pandemic hit, and it proved to be such an amazing gift to have this year to dedicate to my research and my writing. My sabbatical over the last year was thanks to that grant. It gave me the wonderful opportunity to work on my second academic book, which is also on maps and prints from the 16th century. This one is centered on maps of war — how conflict was represented through maps, and how they became an early form of news reporting.
The students in your 92U courses are really connecting with you and the material, many of them registering for each new one and the class size growing — there were 150 online participants from across 22 states plus Canada, even Italy, in your Renaissance Florence class! What do you think students are finding most meaningful, and what do you most hope they take away from these classes?
The students in these courses share a passion for exploring and learning that makes the sessions terrifically exciting for them, and also for me. I hope people come away with a desire to know even more, and with a deeper love for the subject than they started with. One of the wonderful things about these courses is that they show you can become passionate about a place and its treasures from far away. There are many ways to become worldly.
Lastly and on a personal note, you are a Renaissance art scholar married to a medieval art scholar, and living in a mid-century modern house! Anything you’d like to share about that delightful fact?
Haha! Well, the ingredients of modern architecture are, in a way, very classical ingredients — they’re pure geometry. We live in an area where the typical house is a Colonial, and my husband and I wanted something different and unique. We found it — it has flowing space and lots of windows and lots of light, and it’s an amazing modernist home for a couple of art and architectural historians!
Dr. Jessica Maier’s new 92U course, Art and Culture of Renaissance Venice, begins Thursday, July 29.