MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MONSTROSITIES | FALL 2026

The Grotesque Law of Property

When he composed the Triumphs—a series of allegorical descriptions in which Love is vanquished by Death, who is in turn conquered by Fame, until all such figures eventually succumb to Eternity—the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch was giving to the visual arts a set of images that would make for both sumptuous and playful pictorializations. Over the next two centuries, images of the allegorized triumphs were adapted by court artists wishing to promote a ruler’s values while harnessing the military metaphor of a victorious procession. Triumphs inflected works of art with the language of legitimacy: what was won in battle could be rightfully claimed as property and was paraded as such. When makers of prints took up this imagery, they presented triumphal processions as “grotesque” imagery, meaning that it had been sourced from the “grottoes” or underground rooms of the Roman Emperor Nero’s opulent palace. Yet in quoting from and riffing on such imagery, printmakers were not only presenting the iconography of victorious procession as linked to ancient Rome; they were also acknowledging monstrous Roman martial practices and vicious Roman law as the basis of still active artistic claims about what could be asserted as one’s own and what had to be shared.

Monstrosities
View Fall 2026 Lecture List

Center for the Humanities · 95 Pearl Street, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/humanities