Dr. Victoria C.G. Coates Cultural Historian and Ph.D Victoria C. G. Coates is a cultural historian who received her Ph.D. from The University of Pennsylvania specializing in Italian renaissance art. Dr. Coates’ research focuses on issues of self-fashioning and reception, interests that unite projects ranging from new interpretations of Cellini’s Autobiography and Raphael’s Transfiguration to a reassessment of the modern reception of Pompeii and Herculaneum. She has contributed to conferences and symposia in the United States and Europe, and her work has appeared in The Sixteenth-Century...
Overview
In Victoria Coates’ 2016 book David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art the author argues that democracy has had a unique capacity to inspire some of the greatest artistic achievements of western civilization from the Parthenon to Picasso’s Guernica. While Dr. Coates does not maintain that this is an exclusive arrangement, or without its fair share of failure and catastrophe, ultimately democracy emerges as one of the great catalysts of western civilization. In this talk Dr. Coates will focus on two case studies from David’s Sling, Michelangelo’s "David" and Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains: Lander’s Peak, and then expand the discussion to explore how similar histories could be written about two other pillars of western civilization: the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the belief in the limitless potential of the individual.
