Online lecture: Laura Kuurne

10.03.2026

16.15—17.30

Teams

Lecture free of charge

Enter the lecture on Teams on 10 Mar at 4.15 pm here

The Wise Man’s Robe – The Mystery of David Teniers’ Old Man

On the wall of Serlachius’ exhibition space, an old man dressed in a blue fur-trimmed jacket and hat sits studying papers at a table. David Teniers Jr. has painted several works depicting this similar figure.

Various images of scholars, alchemists, and scientists were popular in 17th-century Dutch art. The lecture sets out to find out what this old man dressed in an oriental style and the fascinating details of the picture can tell us about the era and its thinking.

Laura Kuurne, MA, is the Head of Collections and Exhibitions at the Serlachius Museums. She has worked as a researcher and chief curator at Serlachius since 2007.

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.