The Linbury Lecture at the National Gallery 2020 is the second in a new series of annual lectures which bring distinguished personalities from the broad fields of culture, academia and museums to explore themes relating to the National Gallery’s history and its collections.

Salvatore Settis’s thoughtful and stimulating lecture on Renaissance poetics and the intersection with a certain mode of poetic painting in sixteenth-century Venice was given online in January 2021. Intended as a tribute to the National Gallery exhibition, Titian: Love, Desire, Death, it discusses the peculiar nature of the word poesie, repeatedly used by Titian to characterise the cycle of six pictures he painted for Philip II of Spain. While Titian’s cycle was created at a later stage in his life, Settis argues that he first adopted this particular metaphorical register in his pictorial language much earlier in his career, rivalling poetry’s evocative power.