Online lecture: Hanna Pirinen

05.02.2026

16.15—17.30

Teams

A lecture free of charge

A cowd of people presnted in valley with a solder kneeling in front a king-looking old man dressed in white on the foreground.
Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Aabraham Meeting Melchizedek, 1648, oil on canvas. Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation. Photograph: Arno de la Chapelle.
Access to the lecture in Finnish language on Teams on 5 Feb at 4.15 pm

Online lecture: Hanna Pirinen

05.02.2026

16.15—17.30

Teams

A lecture free of charge

A cowd of people presnted in valley with a solder kneeling in front a king-looking old man dressed in white on the foreground.
Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Aabraham Meeting Melchizedek, 1648, oil on canvas. Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation. Photograph: Arno de la Chapelle.
Access to the lecture in Finnish language on Teams on 5 Feb at 4.15 pm

The Journey of Adventures to Canaan—The Story of Abraham as Told in the Old Testament

A large painting from 1648 depicting the progenitor Abraham and Melchizedek, the king and high priest of Salem, which is part of Serlachius’s collection, is a good example of the influence of the imagery surrounding the artist on the work of an individual artist.

Born in Amsterdam, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674) was influenced by his teachers and contemporary art. Printed materials, such as picture Bibles and graphics depicting Christian themes, provided 17th-century painters with models for composition and the rendering of details.  In the lecture, Eeckhout’s painting serves as a peephole into this diverse visual world.  The lecture is given in Finnish language.

Hanna Pirinen

Hanna Pirinen, PhD, Docent, works as a university researcher at the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, specialising in art history. She specialises in 16th–17th century art and object tradition in Finnish and European contexts. 

The Encrypted Language of Images – A Series of Lectures

The Encrypted Language of Images is a series of five free online lectures organised by Serlachius and the University of Jyväskylä in cooperation. The addresses in Finnish language by art history experts are aimed at everyone interested in viewing images and their history. The lecture series focuses on art from the 15th and 17th centuries. 

The presentations shed light on what kind of symbols and allegories art has used or what the details of the paintings tell us about the thinking and culture of the era. We also get a glimpse of how colours were mixed in Rembrandt’s time.

A special area of strength of the Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation’s collection is its collection of old European art, which is significant and rare in Finland. It contains about a hundred works from the 1500s and 1700s. The collection includes Dutch, Flemish, Italian and Spanish art.