Dr. Sarah Blake McHam, Professor of Italian Renaissance Art at Rutgers University, will give the keynote address on October 30 for the opening of the sixth quadrennial Italian Renaissance Sculpture Conference. Rhodes College and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art are jointly hosting the conference October 30-November 1, 2008. Free and open to the public, the lecture begins at 7 p.m. in Blount Auditorium of Buckman Hall at Rhodes.

McHam will present "Donatello's Judith as the Emblem of God's Chosen People: The Statue's Political Meanings After 1495." She is a specialist in Italian painting and sculpture between 1200 and 1600. Her publications include Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge University Press, 1998; paperback edition, 2000), a volume of essays that employ different critical methodologies to analyze sculpture, and "Donatello's Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence," published in The Art Bulletin, 83 (March 2001).

Donatello was a sculptor and artist whose Judith sculpture depicted the assassination of the Assyrian general Holofernes. It and Donatello's depiction of David were displayed in the outdoor spaces of the Medici Palace in Florence, Italy for about 30 years. They are among the earliest freestanding Renaissance statues.

McHam's other books include The Chapel of St. Anthony at the Santo and the Development of Venetian Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Central Italian Sculpture, 1400-1500:An Annotated Bibliography (Boston, G.K. Hall, 1986), and The Sculpture of Tullio Lombardo; Studies in Sources and Meaning (New York, Garland Press, 1978).

The Italian Renaissance Sculpture Conference features 60 of the world's leading sculpture specialists from countries including the United States, Italy, Germany, France, and England. Museum curators will be attending from the National Gallery in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Kimbell Museum of Art in Fort Worth, TX, among others.

All talks are free and open to the public and will be held on the campus of Rhodes College and at the Brooks Museum. A full schedule of events for the Memphis conference is available on the Rhodes College website.