Marian Art Lecture by Professor Diane Apostolos-Cappadona

CMS
5 days ago
2 min read

DATE: Tuesday 3 February 2026

TIME: 7:00pm in the UK; 1:00 pm US CT; 2:00 pm US ET;

8:00 pm in France and Poland.

Online via Zoom

It is not too late to register for our Candlemas event, organised in memory of our late colleague Dr Cathy Oakes. We are honoured that our guest speaker is the eminent Art Historian Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, who will give an illustrated lecture entitled 'The Virgin Mary from the perspectives of women scholars: Anna Jameson, Marina Warner, and Miri Rubin.'

Professor Apostolos-Cappadona will discuss the history of the study of Marian art since the initial publication of Mrs. Jameson’s Legends of the Madonna in the Fine Arts (1852) to Dame Marina Warner’s now classic volume Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) and Professor Miri Rubin’s more recent Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (2009), highlighting the influence of feminist studies in the imaging and interpretation of Mary in visual culture.

Our Guest Speaker

Diane Apostolos-Cappadona is Professor Emerita of Religious Art and Cultural History in the Catholic Studies Program at Georgetown University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Art History Program at The George Washington University. She received the Georgetown University Alumni Association Faculty Award for 2008 as well as both the Annual Award for Excellence in the Arts from The Newington-Cropsey Foundation and the Excellence in Teaching Faculty Award from Georgetown University in 2000. During 1996-97, she was a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University.

Professor Apostolos-Cappadona is the author and editor of numerous books, including Mary Magdalene: A Visual History (2023); A Guide to Christian Art (2020); Encyclopedia of Women in Religious Art (1996); Dictionary of Christian Art (1994); and The Spirit and the Vision: The Influence of Christian Romanticism on the Development of 19th-Century American Art (1995); and of the introduction for the reprint edition of Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art by Gerardus van der Leeuw (2006).

Her forthcoming publications in 2026 include:

Editor-in-Chief, Sources and Documents in the History of Christian Art.11

Volumes. Bloomsbury/T&T Clark. (Volumes II, III.A, III.B, IV, VII, VIII)

Editor. 19th-Century American Art, Volume VII of Sources and Documents in the

History of Christian Art. Bloomsbury/T&T Clark.

Editor-in-Chief. Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion and the Arts in the West,

2 volumes. Oxford University Press.

General Editor and Contributor. The Oxford Handbook of Mary Magdalene.

An event in honour of Dr Cathy Oakes

Cathy, who was one of the founding members of the Centre for Marian Studies, was an art historian with particular expertise in medieval Marian iconography. Her untimely death in 2019 remains a great loss to us on both a personal and academic level. Every year we hold a lecture around the time of Candlemas as an opportunity to remember Cathy and to reflect on the importance of Marian art.