Barocci: Brilliance and Grace is one of the most stimulating and well curated exhibitions to be held in London in recent years. There is in fact a relative wealth of religious art exhibitions in London currently, the equally excellent Murillo & Justino de Neve: the art of friendship is on show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Possessions and sacred signs in the art of Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556) Paul Hills, Courtauld Institute of Art Active in northern Italy in a period when the function of sacred images was challenged by reformers, Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480-1556/7) was a painter who was inventive in recasting religious imagery. This lecture will argue that Lotto’s career sheds a vivid light on the shifting relation between authorship, ownership and devotion in Early Modern Italy. Moving between religious subjects and portraiture, Lotto suggests an enfolding of the self within the dwelling place of garments. All manner of textiles, including fashionable clothes and furnishings, are displayed as tokens personal possession, yet at the same time Lorenzo Lotto discovers domestic equivalents – in towels, handkerchiefs, and shawls – for the vestments of religious ritual. Paul Hills studied the History of Art at the University of Cambridge…
Varieties of Venetian Colour: Titian and Veronese Professor Paul Hills, The Courtauld Institute of Art Venetian painters of the Renaissance are celebrated above all others for their colour and for their handling of the medium of oil paint. This lecture explores how Titian embodied this aesthetic both in his religious images and in his mythological nudes. Typically his corporeal colour engages the sense of touch as well as sight. The younger master Paolo Veronese responded to Titian’s colorism but also departed from it. The son of stonecutter from Verona, he responded to the new fashion for whiteness in the architecture of Palladio. I will argue that shifts in colour preference in sixteenth-century Venice may be related to changes in material culture, such as those brought about by the influx of silver from the New World. Paul Hills studied the History…
Space, Memory, Narrative: The Oratorians and the Memorialization of San Filippo Neri in Rome, Florence and Naples Glenys L. Adams, University of Melbourne PhD Completion Seminar, Art History, School of Culture and Communication The Rooms of San Filippo Neri at the Roman Oratory in the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella (Chiesa Nuova) Rome were reconstructed between 1635 and 1643. This thesis is an examination of these rooms and argues that the relationship established between the architecture of the spaces, framed in relation to the carefully positioned relics, objects and paintings on display in these rooms, served an important means of legitimizing Filippo Neri’s mysticism and the creation of an Oratorian narrative that became the model for how the memory and cult of Filippo Neri was authenticated beyond the Roman Oratory. Date: 1-2pm, Wednesday 10 April, 2013 Date: Visual Cultures Resource Centre,…
Art History Seminars at the School of Culture and Communication, Melbourne University Semester 1, 2013 Wednesdays 1-2 pm Venue: ‘The Linkway‘, John Medley Building, 4th Floor All Welcome 6 March | Robert Gunn, George Chaloupka Fellow, Museums & Art Galleries of NT | The Jawoyn rock art project 13 March | Susan Russell | Former Assistant Director, British School at Rome | Herman van Swanevelt, Gaspard Dughet and Bad Weather 27 March | Kathleen Kiernan | University of Melbourne | Refashioning Dutch Art into the English Landscape: The Commercialisation of Landscape Prints in Eighteenth-Century London 17 April | Michael Varcoe-Cocks| Conservator, National Gallery of Victoria | Japonisme wilt: The history, analysis and treatment of John Peter Russell’s Almond tree in blossom c1887 8 May | Hasan Niyazi & Felicity Harley-McGowan | in conversation New modes of art historical discourse: blogging & social media in research, some ‘pros and cons’ 29…
The ‘Four Horsemen’ exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria draws together a rich, varied and evocative selection of images of death: the horseman crushing rich and poor alike beneath the hooves of his skeletal horse; the shadowy figure stalking the young and the beautiful; the horrors of war; the terrors of the final Apocalypse.
Figuring and Refiguring Flora, Goddess of Flowers, in Early Modern Culture Professor Ann Shteir, York University In Roman mythology and popular culture, the goddess Flora rules over the flowering of plants, and as such is to be appeased, lest buds not set and grain not grow. A figure of reproductive power, nurturant and material, and also an eroticized and pleasure-seeking figure, she has carried conflictual beliefs about the female sexed and gendered body across centuries. With reference to Ovid’s account of Flora in his calendar poem Fasti, this talk will consider early modern figurings and refigurings of Flora in Botticelli’s Primavera, a 17th-century horticultural manual, and a few 18th-century British botanical publications. Date: Thursday 1 November, at 6:15pm Venue: Old Arts, North Lecture Theater, Melbourne University, Parkville Bookings not required. All welcome. Enquiries to the Early Modern Circle http://www.amems.unimelb.edu.au/seminars/earlymoderncircle.html
European Visual Culture Seminar Solidarity, Betrayal, and Opportunism: Deluxe Manuscript Production for Two High-Status Couples in Renaissance Florence Hugh Hudson This paper will discuss two deluxe Florentine Renaissance manuscripts in Melbourne collections, the manuscript containing the Scriptores historiae Augustae in the State Library of Victoria, and the Strozzi-Acciaioli Hours in the National Gallery of Victoria, interpreting their heraldry, emblems, inscriptions, and texts, as well as archival evidence, to describe the circumstances surrounding their commissions. It has been possible in the case of the former manuscript to identify more reliable evidence for the original owners, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Clarice Orsini, than in previous studies. In the latter case it has been possible to identify the more likely original owners as Benedetto Strozzi and Caterina Acciaioli, than those suggested to date. The approach taken is also broader than in previous studies,…
La bella sirena: Portraits of female musicians in seventeenth-century Italy Mark Shepheard PhD Candidate in Art History in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne The portrait of the musician in early modern Italy was intimately linked to the status of music-making as a profession. The confined role of women in public life denied many of them the opportunity to pursue music as a professional practise. Ecclesiastical institutions, one of the principal sources of employment for musicians, were firmly closed to women. Instead, female musicians were usually engaged at secular courts as musically gifted ladies-in-waiting rather than as professionals. Even after the establishment in the mid-seventeenth century of commercial opera houses, some of which employed female singers, women continued to endure an ambiguous relationship with professional music-making. The female singer was often seen as a woman of low…
European Visual Culture Seminar A newly discovered late work by Artemisia Gentileschi: Susanna and the Elders (1652) Adelina Modesti In 1652 Artemisia Gentileschi painted Susanna and the Elders, considered her last documented work, and believed lost. The painting has recently reappeared in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna with an attribution to the Baroque Bolognese artist Elisabetta Sirani, but identified as a work of Artemisia Gentileschi by the present speaker. This paper will explore the circumstances of the rediscovery, placing the work within the context of Gentileschi’s oeuvre, tracing its provenance and proposing a possible patron, based on recently discovered documents and on literary accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr Adelina Modesti is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Historical & European Studies, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Date: Monday 16 July 2012, 6:30pm Venue: Jim Potter Room, Old…
In Search of the Picturesque: The Architectural Ruin in Art Reviewed by David R. Marshall In Search of the Picturesque: The Architectural Ruin in Art at Geelong Art Gallery (closing this Sunday 24th June). I have finally caught up with the exhibition In Search of the Picturesque: The Architectural Ruin in Art at Geelong Art Gallery (closing soon on 24 June) so go quickly if you haven’t done so already. This exhibition showcases Colin Holden’s collection of Old Master prints, to which have been added loans of paintings from the National Gallery of Victoria and Art Gallery of South Australia, prints from the State Library of Victoria, and various items from the Geelong Gallery collection and other sources. In the main room it is good to see some old favourites brought together: from the NGV there is the Panini Cumaean Sibyl…
The Italian Renaissance in Australia – a tribute to Villa I Tatti This public and free event brings together for the first time Australian scholars who have, over the previous years, held fellowships at the prestigious Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of this extraordinary institution and these scholars wish to pay tribute to the contribution it has made to their research by presenting their own work as well as that of some of their American I Tatti colleagues. The event begins on the afternoon of Thursday 19 July with a seminar by two American scholars and former Tattiani, Elizabeth Horodowich and Timothy McCall, who will discuss their latest research. That evening there will be a talk by internationally renowned Harvard scholar and head librarian at Villa I Tatti,…
Nicolas Poussin, The Crossing of the Red Sea, 1633-34 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Poussin’s Crossing of the Red Sea was once something of a problem painting. Indeed, its exact relationship to the pendant Adoration of the Golden Calf (National Gallery, London) has made great fodder for undergraduate essay questions. The two works, clearly related in content and—as we shall see—origin have often been seen as quite dissimilar in composition and style, and these differences were once taken to indicate that the two paintings date from slightly different periods in the 1630s. We know from Bellori’s Life of Poussin (1674) that both the Crossing and the Golden Calf were painted for Amedeo dal Pozzo, Marchese del Voghera (1579-1644), and that they hung in his palazzo in Turin. Luigi Scaramuccia in his treatise on Italian painters—Le finezze de’ pennelli italiani, 1672—adds…
Giuseppe Caletti, David with the Head of Goliath, Birmingham Museums and Art Galleries, c. 1650 The future King of Israel, David, is contemplating the head of the slain Goliath, champion of the Philistines. As the book of Samuel recounts, David hurls a stone from his sling, which hits Goliath in the centre of his forehead and fells him; David subsequently cuts off his head which results in the flight of the Philistines. In Caletti’s painting, David seems to focus on the wound made by his slingshot; it is a congealed ochre smear, the aftermath of violence, reminiscent of the great red spot of Jupiter, or a bloodshot cyclopean eye. Now the giant’s real eyes are closed forever, but this mark seems to fascinate David as he seems to think back to the time of the battle. The impact must have…
Guercino: A Passion for Drawing – The Collections of Sir Denis Mahon and the Ashmolean Museum Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford, 11th February 2012 to 15th April 2012 Reviewed by David Packwood Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known as Guercino (1591-1666) because of his squint, was one of the most prolific draughtsmen of the seicento. Many of his drawings survive, attesting to his industry, commitment and unwavering belief in his art. Born in Cento—mid way between Bologna and Ferrara—the biographers say that he drew from the age of six. Beckoned by the flourishing Carracci academy in Bologna, Guercino went there to study their art, but had the confidence to set up shop on his own. With the election of a Bolognese pope from the Ludovisi family in 1621, Guercino found artists from that region favoured, and so he graduated to painting ceilings of palaces…