This presentation by Professor Valeria Finucci examines the invention of plastic surgery for the remaking of noses and other facial features in order to give back a “human” face to those who had lost theirs. To opt for an elective surgery in the sixteenth century, when neither antiseptics nor anesthesia were available, must have meant that the patient (always male at the time, unlike today) was willing to die in order to remove facial disfigurations stemming from disease or injuries. But why? Finucci connects the desire for an ideal face to ideals of beauty, proportion, balance, and harmony that permeated Renaissance art and thought.
Valeria Finucci (Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University and the 2016-2017 Charles Speroni Endowed Chair Visiting Professor at the Department of Italian at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her principal field of research is Renaissance theater, epic, romance, and treatise; women writers, medical and literary understandings of the body, Venetian culture, Renaissance fashion, medicine in early modern Italy, New World pharmacy, and psychoanalysis.
More details may be found HERE
Young Research Library, Presentation Room 11348, UCLA
10745 Dickson Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095