This Thursday, September 8th at 5pm, Dr. Asen Kirin will be presenting “Exuberance of Meaning: The Art Patronage of Catherine the Great.” This talk kicks of the VCC Lecture series for the 2011-2012 academic year, so make sure to put this on your schedule!

Kirin will be discussing a current exhibition which, according to the Lamar Dodd School of Art website, “intends to make a contribution to the current knowledge of patronage in eighteenth-century Russia and to our understanding of the perception of Byzantine culture in the era of neo-Classicism.”

Interestingly, the curator of this exhibit plans to “accomplish this goal with a relatively limited number of objects—loans from a small number of museums in the U.S.A.”

“The exhibition will illustrate the complex dynamic between the collection of historical art and the commissioning of new works of art during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96). The focus of the exhibition is on the particular manner in which Catherine applied not only her knowledge of ancient and medieval glyptic art but also her collection of carved gems to new works of art that she commissioned. This was a deliberate continuation of the centuries-old tradition of placing pagan, Greek, and Roman carved stones onto sacred Christian liturgical and devotional objects. The empress not only shared the Enlightenment sentiment that carved gems were essential material vestiges from the past, but she was also fully cognizant of the cultural meanings associated with the practice of collecting cameos. Accordingly, she addressed these cultural meanings in her art patronage.”