Theology on Tap returns for the season finale on May 10 @ the Rattlesnake! We close out the year with a visit from an old friend, Bethan Farrell Rivello, and her presentation on sacred art:

The Beautiful, the Strange, and the Huh? Sacred Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Art enthusiasts often perceive sixteenth-century Italian art as the apex of the Christian image. But while Michelangelo frescoed the magnificent Sistine ceiling and Raphael painted his beautiful Madonnas, artists also created some of the strangest altarpieces and sacred images in the history of art. This Theology on Tap explores the beautiful as well as the downright bizarre religious art of the sixteenth century. We’ll explore how artists formed a material culture on the Italian peninsula expressing religious thought during a tumultuous season of Christian history.

Bethany Farrell Rivello is working on her PhD at Temple University. She studies cinquecento Italian Renaissance art, centering her dissertation on the painter Bronzino and the bureaucracy and transnational exchange of Duke Cosimo I’s court. Since beginning graduate studies in 2011, she has received the Gretchen Worden Memorial Travel Stipend given by the Museum Council of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley and funded by the Franklin Institute, a departmental Eakins Fund Travel Scholarship, and the Tyler School of Art Dean’s Art History Doctoral Research Grant, as well as presenting her master’s thesis research at the Renaissance Society of America and participating in a Getty-funded institute on digital art history. She recently was awarded the Temple University Graduate School Summer Research Grant for 2016.

Bethany was also an Advent parishioner for several years during her time in Boston, and we’re delighted to have her back. Come out to the Rattlesnake Bar and bring a friend (or 4) to welcome Bethany back to Boston on May 10 @ 7p!

Follow @adventboston for more info.