Online lecture: Lauri Ockenström

26.02.2026

16.15—17.30

Teams

Lecture free of charge

Painted mostly in different dark brown shades, a still-life with an owl on the foreground and its prey of dead birds om the background.
Giuseppe Recco, Still-Life with Birds, 17th century, oil on canvas, Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation. Photograph: Finnish National Gallery, Yehia Eweis
Enter the lecture on Teams on 26 Feb at 4:15 pm here

The Mysteries of Creation: Symbols and Allegories in 15th–17th Century Art

The 15th and 17th centuries can be considered one of the Golden Ages of using symbols and symbolic expression. In Renaissance artworks, flowers, jewels, and exotic animals are not always just decorations, but also keys to understanding the mysteries of creation and God’s purposes.

This lecture examines how animal and plant motifs were used in symbolic meanings in the art of the 15th and 17th centuries, and what kind of meanings were given to depictions of nature and the environment in the visual arts. The lecture is given in Finnish language.

Lauri Ockenström

PhD, Docent Lauri Ockenström works as a university lecturer in art history at the University of Jyväskylä. He specializes in the cultural history, symbolics and history of magic in the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era.

The Encrypted Language of Images – Lecture Series Symbols and Stories the 15th trough 17th Century Art

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 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.