Join AIA-Nashville Society for an in-person symposium on August 19 at 6 PM at the Nashville Parthenon. This symposium is free and open to the public, and will take place in the Naos on Level 2. RSVP required.

Vivien Green Fryd, Professor Emerita in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Vanderbilt University, Ph.D, will share about American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820), including West’s Venus and Cupid (1765), part of the Parthenon permanent collection.

ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM:
Benjamin West’s Venus and Cupid (1765) in the Parthenon’s Cowan Collection marks the first commission this Philadelphia Quaker received upon arriving in Italy to study art. This work, the first history painting West created in the academic tradition, which rated history painting as the most important subject, represents the mythological Venus, the goddess of love, with her son, Cupid. It also evokes to topos of the Madonna lactans, or the nursing Madonna, which had been a prevalent subject throughout the Italian Renaissance, which he studied while in Italy. West showed emotion and love between parent and child that had not existed until the 1760s, and hence this work joins that of others created by Euro-Americans in the U.S. colonies and abroad who similarly represented changing attitudes towards child-rearing, family relations, and the definition of childhood. West was at the forefront of establishing neoclassical subjects and styles as the premier manner of painting during the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.