Brenda Edgar: Art Historian

As early as the 12th century, European artists imagined the entrance to Hell as a monstrous mouth devouring the damned. In this vividly illustrated talk, we’ll explore how gluttony—one of the seven deadly sins—was visualized from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, with overeaters condemned to eternal digestion by beasts like Cerberus or Satan himself. From force-feeding to infernal feasting, join us for a deep dive into the dark, digestive symbolism of Hell in European art. 

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with the goddess of love herself—Aphrodite. Though famed in myth for her beauty, it wasn’t until the sculptor Praxiteles broke tradition that the female nude was fully embraced in Greek art. In this vividly illustrated talk, we explore the cultural, artistic, and gender revolutions sparked by the Aphrodite of Knidos—the ancient world’s most famous divine sex symbol.  Come for the art history, stay for the goddess’s legendary backside. 

The Book of Revelation has inspired some of the most awe-inspiring and terrifying works in European Medieval and Renaissance art. From jewel-studded visions of the Heavenly Jerusalem to the monstrous maws of Hell, artists brought the Apocalypse to life with astonishing detail. Join me for a lavishly illustrated talk exploring how painters and sculptors visualized divine judgment, celestial glory, and demonic chaos. You’ll never see locusts the same way again. 

 Before the printing press, every book was made by hand—often on parchment crafted from animal skin. In this richly illustrated talk we’ll explore medieval illuminated manuscripts as both sacred texts and physical objects, tracing how quirks of flesh, hair, and even belly buttons shaped the page itself. From shimmering decoration to theological meaning, join us for a journey into the luminous, otherworldly beauty of the handmade book. 

In the 1920s, archaeologists uncovered over 1,000 ancient Sumerian graves in Ur, southern Iraq—including royal tombs filled with gold, musical instruments, and the remains of attendants who died in ritual sacrifice. From the deadly rites of Sumer to the jewel-filled tombs of Assyrian queens, join us for a journey into the ancient rituals of death, royalty, and the afterlife. 

In this enchantingly illustrated talk, we’ll explore Bosch’s fantastical depictions of Earth, Heaven, and Hell—where giant strawberries, pearl-laying bodies, and dreamlike landscapes collide. We’ll also trace his influence on later artists, from the Renaissance to the Surrealists, including Magritte and Dalí, who saw in Bosch a visionary ahead of his time. 

 Across the ancient world, cultures independently constructed monumental, pyramidal, and vertically oriented structures—ziggurats, stepped temples, mounds, and artificial mountains that continue to dominate their landscapes thousands of years later. Why did humans everywhere feel compelled to build up? Join Art Historian Brenda Edgar as she uncovers these these structures not only as tombs, temples, or symbols of power, but as monumental expressions of a pan-human capacity for altered states.

 In fifteenth-century Flemish painting, some of the most important moments in Christian history take place not in churches but in bedrooms. This lecture with Art Historian Brenda Edgars examines the late medieval bedchamber as a charged visual site where theology, domestic life, and embodied experience collide. By reading Annunciation scenes alongside secular interior paintings, we will explore how artists navigated the uncomfortable implications of the Incarnation. 

Before the rise of modern medicine, disease was experienced as physical, spiritual, moral, and social all at once—and healing required more than physical treatment. Across medieval and early modern Europe, this worldview produced a vast and remarkably specific system of healing saints, each invoked against particular ailments: diseases of the eyes, childbirth, plague, cancer, and countless other bodily threats. Drawing on art history, religious practice, and the history of medicine.

 Gargoyles and grotesques occupy one of the most unsettling positions in the history of art and architecture. Emerging in the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe, these distorted and often monstrous figures were not merely decorative. True gargoyles served a functional purpose, channeling rainwater away from stone walls, while their purely sculptural relatives—the grotesques—were designed to confront viewers with fear, excess, and bodily instability. 

 Across history, some of the most ambitious monuments to death were never meant to be built—or never could be built. Designed on paper at impossible scales, these visionary tombs reveal how artists and architects grappled with mortality, memory, and the limits of civilization itself. This lecture will explore a series of unrealized funerary projects from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when architects pushed monumentality to its conceptual extreme.  

 From ancient Egypt to modern astronomy, the Sun and Moon have been more than just celestial bodies — they’ve been living gods and goddesses. This lecture will explore the history of solar, lunar, and planetary deities, and the complex roles they played in shaping human understanding of the cosmos, body, and gender. We’ll focus on the patterns and anomalies in the way deities are depicted.