Event Horizon: Early Modern Warfare and the Monumental Print

Event Horizon: Early Modern Warfare and the Monumental Print

A lecture by Carolyn Yerkes (Princeton University)

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

gallery@bgc.bard.edu

$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members

No late seating; admittance is not guaranteed after 6 pm.

When two technologies converged in the first half of the sixteenth century—artillery warfare and monumental printmaking—a new genre was the result. The monumental siege print was an experiment in how to depict distance between enemies as the defining condition of war. In this talk, Carolyn Yerkes explores a series of enormous woodcuts created in the German-speaking lands of northern Europe during a period of constant war, political turmoil, and religious strife.  

An Early Modern World Lecture

Carolyn Yerkes is associate professor of early modern architecture at Princeton University, where she chairs the Committee on Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. She has written books on Renaissance architectural drawings and on Piranesi; her articles range across a constellation of topics that include construction technology, staircases, the architecture of echoes, carpenters in the American Revolution, sculptures used as lethal weapons, and the first printed self-portrait. Her next book is called Siegelands: Early Modern Warfare and the Monumental Print. 

Image: Augustin Hirschvogel, Map of Vienna, 1552. Etching with hand-coloring on laid paper, 81.9 x 85.4 cm. National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection, 1954.12.71.