Mark Rosen, Falling and Rising: Public Monuments & Cultural Heritage in a Time of Protest

Pietro Tacca's Quattro Mori and the Conditions of Slavery in Early Seicento Tuscany

Dr. Mark Rosen, Associate Professor of Visual and Performing Arts, and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas, in conversation with Dr. Benjamin Lima, Editor of Athenaeum Review. They discuss Pietro Tacca’s monument Quattro Mori (“Four Moors”) in Livorno, Italy. This monument was completed in 1626 amid the conditions of slavery in Tuscany’s main port city, which had a newly constructed bagno and a massive slave trade.

Mark Rosen is Associate Professor of Visual and Performing Arts, and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, in the School of Arts and Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas, as well as President of the Italian Art Society. His book The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Medici Archive Project in Florence and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and is currently at work on a study of the meaning and uses of the bird's-eye view in early modern art, thought, and culture.

Further reading

Mark Rosen, “Pietro Tacca's Quattro Mori and the Conditions of Slavery in Early Seicento Tuscany.” Art Bulletin, March 2015.

Twitter thread on the 'Quattro Mori'

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This lecture is a part of Falling and Rising: Public Monuments & Cultural Heritage in a Time of Protest, a series of interviews produced by the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History and "The Athenaeum Review" at the University of Texas at Dallas with art historians, historians, artists, and archaeologists that examine the current cultural moment of renewed attention to the role of public art.