Tag: Italian Art

Lecture and Discussion Series | Italian art and Spanish patronage, 1500-1800 | NGV Melbourne

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In association with the  exhibition Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court, Museo del Prado’  the NGV is presenting a series of lectures on Italian art and Spanish patronage, 1500-1800. The lectures will touch on topics including art and patronage, Renaissance painting, the art of the Italian Baroque, and more. The Saturday lectures will be followed by Monday night Discussion Groups that will take place in the exhibition space. The lectures will be presented by local art historians who are recognised international experts on the history of Italian art and Spanish patronage between 1500-1800 centuries. All lectures take place at 2pm. Saturday 17 May 2pm | Colour in the Renaissance: Raphael, Correggio and Titian |  David Marshall, Principal Fellow, Art History, The University of Melbourne Saturday 24 May 2pm | The real and the ideal in Baroque painting: Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni | Dr…

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Reminder | Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court | Symposium and Opening Weekend Events

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Symposium | Friday 16th May 1:30pm Delve into the main themes of the show with papers presented by key international and local speakers. Venue: NGV International, 180 St Kilda Road, Clemenger BBDO Auditorium, Ground Level Bookings: Ph +61 3 8662 1555, 10am-5pm daily, Booking Code P1454 Website: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/programs/public-programs/symposium-italian-masterpieces-from-spains-royal-court,-museo-del-prado ‘The father of the Prado is Titian’: Italian Renaissance painting at the Museo del Prado | Speaker Miguel Falomir Faus, Head of Italian & French Painting Department (after 1700), Museo del Prado, and guest co-curator While the Prado opened its doors in 1819, and is thus contemporaneous with other leading European museums, it did not share their encyclopaedic vocation. It was, instead, a home for the Royal Collection. The Prado’s holdings of Italian art was largely formed by the taste of the Habsburg rulers of Spain, firstly that of Charles V and his son Phillip II, whose love of…

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Symposium | Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court, Museo del Prado

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The National Gallery of Victoria is holding a public symposium to coincide with its upcoming exhibition Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court, Museo del Prado. The symposium will include local and international experts on the art of the period. Each paper will delve into the main themes of the show. Date: 1:30 – 3:30pm, Friday 16th May, 2014 Venue: Clemenger BBDO Auditorium, NGV International, 180 St Kilda Road Bookings:  Ph +61 3 8662 1555, 10am-5pm daily or Cost $35 Adults / $28 Members / $30 C / $15 S (includes light refreshments, bookings essential) Website: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/programs/public-programs/symposium-italian-masterpieces-from-spains-royal-court,-museo-del-prado  Program ‘The father of the Prado is Titian’: Italian Renaissance painting at the Museo del Prado | Speaker Miguel Falomir Faus, Head of Italian & French Painting Department (after 1700), Museo del Prado, and guest co-curator While the Prado opened its doors in 1819, and is thus contemporaneous…

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Exhibition Review | The Treasures of Naples | John Weretka

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Il Tesori di Napoli: I Capolavori del Museo di San Gennaro John Weretka Palazzo Sciarra, Rome 30th October 2013-16 February 2014 (now extended until March) Wowing enthusiastic crowds at the Palazzo Sciarra in Rome is a show entitled Treasures of Naples: Masterworks of the Museum of S. Gennaro. Although compact in size, this show brings together some of the prized objects of the Treasury of S. Gennaro, normally held at the Museum of the Treasury of S. Gennaro in Naples; this is the first time a collection of these objects has been permitted to travel. The opening room of this exhibition swiftly sets up the cultural context of S. Gennaro with Francesco Solimena’s magnificent 1702 painting of S. Gennaro blessing, a copy of the Voto della città di Napoli of 1527 that established the Deputation of the Chapel of S.…

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Symposium | Piranesi and the Impact of the Late Baroque | Full Program

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Piranesi and the Impact of the Late Baroque Thursday 27th – Friday 28th February 2014 | University of Melbourne The Australian Institute of Art History, in collaboration with the University Library and the State Library of Victoria will host a conference on Piranesi and the Impact of the Late Baroque on 27 and 28 February 2014 at the University of Melbourne. The conference is conceived in relation to the exhibition, Rome: Piranesi’s vision, 22 February – 22 June, 2014, State Library of Victoria, and the related exhibition The Piranesi Effect, 20 February – 25 May, 2014, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. The full program is available here Piranesi Program (pdf). Speakers His Excellency Pier Francesco Zazo, The Italian Ambassador to Australia | Professor Luigi Ficacci Emeritus Soprintendete of Bologna | Professor Jaynie Anderson, Director AIAH, Herald Chair of Fine Art, University of Melbourne | Dr…

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Exhibitions and Symposium | ‘Rome: Piranesi’s Vision’ at the SLV and ‘The Piranesi Effect’ at the Ian Potter

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In February 2014 two exhibitions on the eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi will open in Melbourne. The State Library of Victoria will host ‘Rome: Piranesi’s Vision’ – an exhibition of Piranesi’s prints, with a particular focus on his Vedute di Roma. This exhibition will draw on the collections of the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne. It will also include illustrated books and paintings by his contemporaries. More information and details of related events on the SLV website. The exhibition is free and will run from Saturday 22 February 2014 – Sunday 22 June 2014 at the Keith Murdoch Gallery in the State Library of Victoria. The Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne will host ‘The Piranesi Effect’. This exhibition will juxtapose Piranesi’s engravings with contemporary art. It will include objects from the Classics and Archaeology Collection…

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Lecture | Pat Simons ‘The Crone, the Witch and the Library in Renaissance Italy’

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The Crone, the Witch and the Library in Renaissance Italy Professor Pat Simons, University of Michigan This paper examines ways in which renewed attention to antiquity during the Renaissance re-invigorated misogynist stereotypes of old women as well as bringing new evidence to the emerging discourse about witches, hence shaping for the hag a vivid pictorial presence. Proof for the threatening female figure was drawn from the humanist’s library of classical authors, many cited in Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s Stryx (1523), which stated that witches were ‘ancient in essence and new in accidents.’ Late medieval depictions of the crone were amalgamated with classical precedents to produce new or revised images such as the personification of Envy, which is a focus here, since Pico claimed it was the core motivation for demons. However, not all witches were conflated with the image of…

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EVCS | Angelo Lo Conte, ‘Landscapes & Garlands of Flowers: an example of naturalistic Lombard devotion’.

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Angelo Lo Conte Landscapes & Garlands of Flowers: an example of naturalistic Lombard devotion. This paper explores the invention and the development of the garland of flowers in European art, characterizing it as an example of mutual synergy between Italian philosophy and Flemish art. During the second half of the sixteenth century, Christian philosophy was strongly influenced by figures such as Filippo Neri, Agostino Valier and Federico Borromeo, who introduced a second wave of Counter-Reformational thought based on an innovative, optimistic idea of the world and of mankind’s role in it. According to this interpretation, all created things, animate and inanimate, had a positive value. Nature was thus seen as a manifestation of God’s goodness, and contemplation of nature became a way to establish a spiritual connection with God. Federico Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, explored this philosophical approach in the…

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News | NGV 2014 Winter Masterpieces Revealed

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Italian Masterpieces from Spain coming to Melbourne Mark Shepheard The National Gallery of Victoria today announced the 2014 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition: Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court, Museo del Prado. This follows hot-on-the-heels of last year’s Portrait of Spain exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (and also at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and again reflects the Museo del Prado’s new—and very welcome—initiative to broaden access to its holdings and strengthen its international profile. Another Prado show, then, but completely different from the Queensland/Houston exhibition, and exclusive to Melbourne. The focus here will be on the Italian works in the Prado collection. For much of the period 1500-1800, Spain ruled large sections of the Italian peninsula and was also extremely influential at the Papal court in Rome. The breadth and quality of the Prado’s Italian holdings are…

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EVCS | Anne McComish ‘Myths and Reality: Mosaics from the Vatican Studio, 1900-32’

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Anne McComish Myths and Reality: Mosaics from the Vatican Studio, 1900-32 The Vatican Mosaic Studio has been producing mosaic artworks of the highest quality since 1727. Some of its finest works take pride of place in the decorative-arts collections of the world’s major galleries, while others are regularly offered for sale by the world’s leading auction houses. Naturally, the finest works are the most valuable, and it is frequently also assumed that the finest works are necessarily the oldest. However, are all of the works on display or offered for sale as old as their gallery labels or sales catalogues suggest? And how many of them are from the Vatican Mosaic Studio at all? Attribution and dating are among the most challenging tasks for any art historian but in the case of mosaics from the Vatican Mosaic Studio the task…

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Lecture | Charting Cultural Transformation through Renaissance Preaching – Peter Howard

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Charting Cultural Transformation through Renaissance Preaching Associate Professor Peter Howard from Monash University   How did the artists of the Sistine Chapel wall frescoes develop and execute a complex programme in an amazingly short period of time? How do we explain the configuration of public space in early Renaissance Italy? Who authorised the magnificent display that characterises Renaissance Florence? These are just some of the questions on which light is shed if an expansive role is assigned to preaching in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy. This argument is a reversal of the image of the mendicant “penitential preachers” that Burckhardt constructed a century and a half ago but that still prevails, even among some scholars. Most commonly, the historiography identifies the humanists as the innovators of the day and as the disseminators of a renewed classical culture. This can…

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Lecture | Dr Arvi Wattel – Ferrarese Metamorphoses: sixteenth-century artistic transformations

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Ferrarese Metamorphoses: sixteenth-century artistic transformations Dr Arvi Wattel, University of Western Australia The artistic output of the Ferrarese painter Dosso Dossi’s decreased markedly after the death of his main employer, Duke Alfonso I. This reduction has long attracted comment, starting with Vasari, who suggested that Dosso had been able to retire in his old age as he enjoyed a pension provided by the Este duke. More recently, the decline in Dosso’s production has been credited to a change of taste at the court of Alfonso’s son, Ercole II, who apparently tended towards the classical as exemplified in the work of Giulio Romano at the neighbouring court of Mantua. This talk will focus on the often cited “paradigm shift” in Ferrarese art in the era of Alfonso I and Ercole II, touching upon contemporary debates of imitation and art vs. nature. Date: Thursday 22 August…

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Art History Seminars at Melbourne University | Semester 2

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The program for art history seminars at the University of Melbourne for semester 2  is below. All seminars are held in The Linkway, John Medley Building, 4th floor (running between the East and West Towers), between 1-2 pm. All welcome. August 7              Anthony White | University of Melbourne Folk Machine: Fortunato Depero’s Cloth Pictures 1920-1925   August 21            Susanne Meurer | University of Western Australia Johann Neudörffer’s “Nachrichten” (1547): calligraphy and historiography in early modern Nuremberg   September 11   Gerard Vaughan | Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne Museum Culture Today: Possibilities and Inhibitions   September 25   Toshio Watanabe | The University of the Arts, London Forgotten Japonisme: taste for Japanese art in Britain and North America 1910s – 1960s   October 9            Penelope Woods |  Centre for Emotions, University of Western Australia The Intentionality of Spectatorship: Emotions in…

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Lecture | Art and Intimacy in 15th Century Italy, Professor Adrian Randolph

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Art and Intimacy in 15th Century Italy Professor Adrian Randolph, Leon E. Williams Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College The word ‘intimacy’ is attractive partly because it summons up a set of interrelated and evocative meanings that speak directly to certain types of objects we tend to call art. Intimacy suggests proximity and closeness, and is tinged with sensual and perhaps sexual possibility, and, when applied to apparel, getting right next to the skin. This epidermal intimacy is matched by a form of interiority lodged etymologically in the word itself: The Latin word, moreover, when metaphorically appended to individuals, suggests an emotional as well as spatial proximity-an intimate acquaintance, someone close to you. These meanings, and others are suggestive. The word intimate points to something essential in reactions to certain types of objects, and to modes of beholding and…

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Seminar | Made in Italy Futurism: the magnificent beauty of the mechanised velocity

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Made in Italy Futurism: the magnificent beauty of the mechanised velocity Antonino L. Nielfi NB Date corrected 29th May NOT 28th. This seminar draws from the theoretical framework of the exhibition “SPEED: The Magnificent Beauty of the Mechanised Velocity” (currently in preparation for the end of 2014/ the beginning of 2015), curated by Antonino Nielfi for the Italian Embassy of Australia (Canberra, ACT). As a whole, this project aims to illustrate the origins and the technological advancement of Italian industrial design from its early years in the 1900s to the end of the Second World War, as it has been masterly witnessed by the artistic research of Italian Futurism, whose insights and findings have evolved overtime into what is known today as the Made in Italy. The seminar will focus on the evolution of the industrial product throughout the first (1909-1918) and the second (1918-1938) phase…

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