13
January 2026

LECTURE - Double Standards in the Italian Renaissance

The Arts Society The Hague
Tuesday, January 13, 2026 - 20:00
Atrium of Church of Our Saviour Pastoral Centre,
Helenastraat 8, The Hague, 2595 HA,
Online Event

This lecture will be live in the Atrium.  For those unable to attend, a Zoom will be available.

Double Standards in the Italian Renaissance

by Harald Hendrix

Dear Members and Guests,

We invite you to join us for the 4th lecture of the season given by Harald Hendrix on ‘Double Standards in the Italian Renaissance’ in the Atrium on Tuesday 13th January 2026 at 20.00 hours.

Renaissance legacy, often accused of practicing and propagating double standards.  As such, they are at the basis of some of the stereotypical negative assessments of Italian men and women in power as they first rose at the court of the French queen Catherine de ’Medici during the later 16th century, but occasionally pop up even today.  Concentrating on such edgy ambiguities, in his talk Harald Hendrix will avoid juxtaposing the idealist and realist angles in Italian 16th-century thinking about ‘Renaissance man’, and instead suggest to understand these apparently contrasting aspects as binary components of a coherent and ultimately unitary line of thought.

This will be a live lecture with the lecturer physically present in the Atrium.  We are hoping that members and Guests will take the opportunity to come to the Atrium.  

For those unable to be present at the Atrium, this lecture will also be streamed via a Zoom to those who registered.

You are requested to sign up for the lecture beforehand, also if you are coming to join us in person at the Atrium, by clicking on the sentence at the 'How to book' section.

 

Harald Hendrix
Harald Hendrix (1958) is full professor of Italian Studies at Utrecht University. Previously he worked as an associate professor Renaissance Studies in the Comparative Literature Department (1994-2001). He served as director of Netherlands Research School in Literary Studies (2002-2006), as head of the department of Modern Languages (2007-2012) and as director of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (2014-2019). With a combined background in Cultural History, Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, he has published widely on the European reception of Italian Renaissance and Baroque culture (Traiano Boccalini fra erudizione e polemica, Olschki, 1995), on the early-modern aesthetics of the non-beautiful as well as on literary culture and memory. He is currently preparing a book on the cultural history of writers' houses in Italy, from Petrarch to the present day. Harald Hendrix is chair of Italian Studies and supervises the RMA program in Renaissance Studies. He is a member of the steering committee of UUCEMS, the Utrecht University Centre for Early Modern Studies. Hendrix chairs the executive board of the Dutch National Monuments Organisation. Recent publications include Writers' Houses and the Making of Memory (Routledge, 2008; paperback 2012), Autorità, modelli e antimodelli nella cultura artistica e letteraria fra Riforma e Controriforma (with Antonello Corsaro and Paolo Procaccioli; Vecchiarelli, 2007), Officine del nuovo (with Paolo Procaccioli; Vecchiarelli, 2008), Dynamic Translations in the European Renaissance (with Philiep Bossier and Paolo Procaccioli; Vecchiarelli, 2011), The Turn of the Soul. Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature (with Lieke Stelling and Todd Richardson; Brill, 2011), The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies (with Geert Buelens en Monica Jansen; Lexington Books, 2012), Cyprus and the Renaissance, 1450-1650 (with Benjamin Arbel en Evelien Chayes; Brepols, 2013), The Idea of Beauty in Italian Literature and Language (met Claudio Di Felice en Philiep Bossier; Brill 2019), and Il papato breve di Adriano VI. Storia, religione, arte, cultura (with Giuseppe Crimi and Anna Esposito: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2024).