[Distinguished Speaker Series] Dr. Kelli Wood: “The Athletic Arts in Early Modern Italy”

Dr. Kelli Wood: “The Athletic Arts in Early Modern Italy”

Wednesday, April 24th, 2024 // 4:00 PM EST

Vorhees Hall, Room 001 // 71 Hamilton St, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Zoom Registration: https://tinyurl.com/dsswood

This talk will explore the development and expression of the athletic arts in Renaissance Italy as they responded to intellectual, courtly, and civic revivals of antiquity as well as an unprecedented expansion of artisanal and professional work related to leisure. Girolamo Cardano classified sport as requiring two separate abilities, “agility of body, as with a ball; or of strength, as with a discus and in wrestling,” and in the sixteenth century exercises which emphasized agility over brute strength increasingly gained prominence as venues for the salubrious maintenance of physique and the performance of aristocratic masculine virtue during social and political conduct. A rhetorical slippage between sport and war frequently manifested itself in both artistic representations of and the performance of sport in order to ascribe the virtues of virility to aristocratic athletes. Yet the real or potential corporeal dominance of a brawny artisanal class, a “rivalry not of birth, but of strength and ability, wherein villagers are quite a match for nobles,” in the words of Castiglione, also fundamentally influenced the regulation and representation of bodies through sport. The rising need for a professional class of athletes paid to perform on the street and as salaried members of courts, experts who also wrote about and taught their athletic arts, alongside the rising need for craftsmen to produce and manage equipment and spaces, proved a complication to the maintenance and perception of social hierarchies. The codification of systems of rules and equipment, far from simply reflecting a growing interest in athletics, was a response in part to bodies on display, and thusly created structures of supervision that consolidated control for powerful operators in homosocial networks. Sports were a central tool in literally and imaginatively shaping the bodies of early modern men and women within intersecting systems of bodily signification, political performance, and social decorum.

Dr. Kelli Wood is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and curator whose work combines methods from art history, game studies, sports science, and museology. In 2019 she joined the University of Tennessee as the Dale G. Cleaver Asst. Professor of Art History – Museum & Curatorial Studies following three years as a postdoctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Wood’s research on the visual and material culture of games and sports spanning from Renaissance board games to contemporary video games has been published in journals such as Art History, Renaissance Studies, ArLis, and in edited volumes and art magazines. Her first book based on her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, The Art of Play in Early Modern Italy, is under contract with Amsterdam University Press. In 2021-2022 Wood undertook an NEH-Mellon Fellowship in Digital Publication for her project on digitizing board games from the Renaissance as playable video games. Her new scholarly projects turn toward sixteenth and seventeenth-century Goa, India, and her research as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to India in 2022-2023 is forthcoming in Renaissance Quarterly. Wood’s research has also been generously supported by the Fulbright Italy, a CASVA Kress fellowship at the NGA, and the Renaissance Society of America. Wood curated a permanent wing of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, A Global History of Sport, which opened in 2022 for the FIFA World Cup. She serves as Field Editor of Early Modern Art for the College Art Association and an editor of The New Art Examiner.