Balls, Games, and Sport in the Renaissance
About this Event
About the Talk
Professor Wood’s new book, Games and Sports in Renaissance Italy, takes readers on a journey through the material and visual cultures of games and how they shaped not only their performance but crucially our knowledge of the past.
Games in the Renaissance offered an inventive and imaginative understanding of the world for their players, one founded not only on iterative performances but also through a visual and material culture imbricated in early modern Italy’s ideologically inflected artistic, scientific, and social systems.
For makers, players, viewers, and patrons, for lords, professional athletes, and gambling workmen, the visual culture of games – the art of play – stood at the very center of the world we have long known as the Renaissance.
This talk will focus on sport in the Renaissance including the production and use of balls and ball games and will feature The World’s Oldest Football in The Smith’s collection. The athletic arts combined local popular traditions with embodied reenactments of classical antiquity, and the sporting equipment created by artisans shaped the bodies and lives of princes and paupers alike.
About the Speaker
Kelli Wood is the Dale G. Cleaver Asst. Professor of Art History – Museum & Curatorial Studies at the University of Tennessee. Her widely published research on the visual and material culture of games and sports spans from printed playing cards and Renaissance board games to contemporary video games and she is the author of the book Games and Sports in Renaissance Italy: The Art of Play (Routledge, 2026). She curated a permanent wing of the 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, “A Global History of Sport,” which opened in 2022 for the FIFA World Cup in Doha. A Fulbright-Nehru U.S. Scholar to India in 2022-2023, Wood’s new scholarly and creative projects focus on craft and ecology in Goa and have been supported through fellowships at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti Center (2024) and the American Academy in Rome (2025). With Leandré D'Souza, she co-curated the exhibition and associated book Makers & Materials: Goa Past and Present (Sunaparanta; LaFA, 2025).
Where is it happening?
GBP 3.96 to GBP 6.13
