On Wednesday, May 15 at 7pm, the Myth Salon will be visited by Dr. Maeve O’Donnell, coming to us from the Getty Center, where Maeve is a scholar of Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts. He talk will cover representations of the underworld and afterlife in medieval manuscripts, focusing on what these realms were believed to have looked like to the ancients, Medieval and Renaissance cultures. She will also discuss early Spanish manuscripts and late medieval manuscripts, discussing the symbols and images – cultural and liturgical. If you have seen the Getty’s collection of illuminated manuscripts, you know how colorful and how small they are. Amplifying the imagery to fill the high-def TV downstairs is certain to yield an amazing experience with what has become the backbone of western art history.
Dr. Maeve O’Donnell received her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art in England where she wrote a thesis on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century altar furnishings and liturgical objects from the Iberian kingdom of Castile. Before moving to London for her PhD, Maeve worked for four years in the Counsel’s Office of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and completed her MA at Hunter College (CUNY) and her BA at New York University. An article based on her PhD has been recently published in Medievalia and another is out next month. She is also currently working on an expansive book project on the Castilian altar.