Joslyn Art Museum in partnership with Creighton University presents stimulating lectures by Creighton faculty in Joslyn’s Abbott Lecture Hall on select Sundays at 2:00 pm. CU at Joslyn, offered in collaboration with Creighton’s University College, presents a variety of topics and interdisciplinary perspectives on Joslyn’s collections or exhibitions. CU at Joslyn is free for Museum members and Creighton students and faculty with ID, and $5 for the general public.
"The Power of Water in Early Christian Art" by Gregory Bucher is scheduled conjunction with Joslyn’s special exhibition, Poseidon and the Sea: Myth, Cult, and Daily Life (February 8 - May 11, 2014).
One theme associated with the exhibition is water, the province of the god Poseidon. During this lecture Bucher will explore images connected with this primal element, but from an early Christian point of view. Given the focus on water, baptism is the clearest connection between the established classical culture, represented by Poseidon, and the emerging Christian culture. The preeminent importance of Baptism required a visual language to convey its central aspects of purification and consequent absorption of the neophyte into the Christian community with attendant salvation. As a result, early Christian art abounds in metaphorical ways of expressing this, for example by adopting useful stories from the Hebrew Bible, such as Noah's ark. Bucher will chronologically survey the evolution of this imagery in early Christian art, and fit it usefully into a description of the development of Christian art as a whole.
Image: Roman, Imperial, ca. AD 150–60; Sarcophagus Lid Relief Fragment: two dolphins swim left on waves; Marble; Tampa Museum of Art, Gift of C. B. Richard Ellis, Inc., and Camden Properties 2004.006
Other CU at Joslyn talks...
September 22 - “Do you see what I see?: The Traveling Views of Martín Rico y Ortega, a Spanish Landscape Arts Painter in 19th-Century Europe“ presented by José McClanahan, Modern Languages and Literatures
October 6 – “Imagining the Universe: The Collage of Art & Science” presented by Jack Gabel, Physics
March 30 - “Treasure Found: The Joslyn’s Early Christian Sarcophagus Fragment” presented by Amanda Swisher, Classical and Near Eastern Studies
April 13 - “The Life and Times of François Auguste René Rodin” presented by Jan Lund, Modern Languages and Literatures