Tag: Melbourne University

Lecture TONIGHT | When Computers Look at Art - David G. Stork

When Computers Look at Art David G. Stork New computer methods have been used to shed light on a number of recent controversies in the study of art. For example, computer fractal analysis has been used in authentication studies of paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock recently discovered by Alex Matter. Computer wavelet analysis has been used for attribution of the contributors in Perugino’s Holy Family. An international group of computer and image scientists is studying the brushstrokes in paintings by van Gogh for detecting forgeries. Sophisticated computer analysis of perspective, shading, color and form has shed light on David Hockney’s bold claim that as early as 1420, Renaissance artists employed optical devices such as concave mirrors to project images onto their canvases. Dr.David G. Stork, Distinguished Research Scientist and Research Director at Rambus Labs, is a graduate in physics of the…

Art History Seminar Series at Melbourne University | Semester 1 Program

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…

Lecture | The science of conserving Gija art: How Indigenous and Western knowledge systems come together

 The science of conserving Gija art: How Indigenous and Western knowledge systems come together   The Melbourne Materials Institute (MMI) and the Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation (CCMC) are pleased to invite you to “The science of conserving Gija art: How Indigenous and Western knowledge systems come together”. In March 2011, floods destroyed the Warmun Community and seriously damaged the significant Warmun Community Art Collection. From this catastrophic event has emerged an exciting engagement between scientists, artists, conservators and art managers that is expanding ways of thinking about art, science and cultural material. Come and join us for a unique insight into the art and science of Indigenous cultural materials conservation and the culture of the Gija people. Speakers A/Prof Robyn Sloggett will discuss the importance of incorporating Gija Indigenous knowledge into university-based research and training in art conservation. Dr…

Art History Seminars at Melbourne University

Art History Seminars at Melbourne University Wednesday  October 3rd: Laura Castagnini, Humour in feminist art Wednesday October 10: Felicity Harley-McGowan, Fake or Medieval forgery? An engraved gem in the British Museum the problems of its provenance     Time: Wednesdays 1-2 pm. Venue: Old Physics, G16 (the Jim Potter Room), University of Melbourne, Parkville All welcome. Enquiries to Felicity Harley McGowan fharley@unimelb.edu.au

Exhibition and Floortalks | A Body of Knowledge - The Anatomy Lesson

A Body of Knowledge - The Anatomy Lesson Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia September 13, 2020 - January 20, 2021 Two exhibitions across three venues The Anatomy Lesson Artists and anatomists share a long history of imagining the body, using their knowledge of what can be “seen” to reveal and understand what is “unseen” – the life that lies beneath the surface. The anatomy Lesson includes a wonderful range of images and objects sourced from the University’s many distinctive collections. Seventeenth-century anatomical texts and prints from the Baillieu Library collection will jostle with paintings and drawings from the University of Melbourne Art Collection and the Victorian College of the Arts. Venue: Grimwade and Annex galleries, 1st Floor, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Swanston St, The University of Melbourne Dates: 13th September 2012 - 20th January 2013, Tuesday to Friday 10am to 5pm, Saturday and Sunday 12noon to 5pm Free Admission More information see: http://www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/exhibitions/exhib-date/2012-09-01/exhib/the-anatomy-lesson or http://medicine150.mdhs.unimelb.edu.au/event/floortalks Lunchtime Floortalks…

Symposium | The Legacies of Bernard Smith

The Legacies of Bernard Smith A Collaborative International Symposium Thursday, 20 - Friday 21,September 2012, The Australian Institute of Art History, University of Melbourne Bernard Smith could be said to have established Australian Art History. His work was seminal for histories of Pacific encounter and he also was author to some of the country’s most eloquent memoirs. This Symposium brings together an international field of scholars from art history, anthropology, history and literature, as well as curators and writers, to discuss all aspects of Bernard Smith’s wide-ranging work and explore its impact and legacy. Date: Thursday, 20 September 2012, 9.30am -6.00pm and Friday, 21 September 2020 I 9.30am - 5.00pm Venue: Public Lecture Theatre, Old Arts Building, The University of Melbourne, Parkville To download the full Melbourne program, please click here (pdf). There will be a second symposium in Sydney on Friday 9th and Saturday…

Lecture | Landscape, Ancient Monuments and Memory in Early Modern Britain - Alexandra Walsham

Landscape, Ancient Monuments and Memory in Early Modern Britain  Professor Alexandra Walsham, Greg Dening Lecture In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the landscape of the British Isles was littered with mysterious remnants of the prehistoric past: stone circles, chambered tombs, and standing stones. This lecture explores the evolution of early modern ideas about the origin, function and significance of these monuments. It considers how attitudes towards the partly natural and partly man-made physical environment were shaped and transformed by the profound theological upheavals associated with the Protestant Reformation and by intellectual and cultural developments that fostered a growing fascination with the early history and archaeology of Britain and Ireland. Then, as now, people perceived and interpreted the landscape through the prism of their own moral and spiritual values and social and political preoccupations. The lecture will assess the critical importance…

UPDATED Lecture | The Gift of Tears: Gender and Emotion in the Art of Rembrandt and his Contemporaries Stephanie S. Dickey

NB See details below for changed date and venue The Gift of Tears: Gender and Emotion in the Art of Rembrandt and his Contemporaries Stephanie S. Dickey, Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada Literary responses to paintings and prints by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and other artists of the early modern Netherlands show that art theorists and connoisseurs appreciated the artist’s ability to capture the emotional nuances of a subject. This lecture explores one fundamental aspect of emotional display, the shedding of tears, as represented in historical subjects and portraits. Visual and literary sources reveal patterns in the social significance of emotion, and specifically of sorrow, as related to gender and circumstance. The depiction of tearful emotion constituted a key element in the representation of human, especially female, subjectivity and prompted complex responses in contemporary…

Melbourne University Art History Seminar Series Semester 2 2012

Melbourne University Art History Seminar Series Program for Semester 2, 2012 Time: Wednesdays 1-2 pm. Venue: Old Physics, G16 (the Jim Potter Room), University of Melbourne, Parkville All welcome. Enquiries to Felicity Harley McGowan fharley@unimelb.edu.au July 25 Prof. Barbara Larson University of West Florida, MacGeorge Fellow | Darwin and the Creator’s Divine Breath August 1  Lachlan Turnbull University of Melbourne | The Contexts of Early Christian Art                    August 8 Caroline Wallace University of Melbourne | Messing up the Museum: Theatrical Art Activism in 1960s New York August 15 Pamela Tuckett University of Melbourne | Sir Charles Eastlake and some paintings for Colonial Victoria August 29  Katrina Grant University of Melbourne | The Academy and the Garden September 12 Adam Goatley University of Melbourne |  Sceptical Discourses: Re-thinking the ‘absolute’ in Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists”  October 10  Lachlan Turnbull University of Melbourne |  ‘The Harm He…

Seminar | Barbara Larson: Darwinism and the Creator’s Divine Breath: The Evolutionary Landscape of the Spiritual in Symbolism

Melbourne University Art History Seminar Darwinism and the Creator’s Divine Breath: The Evolutionary Landscape of the Spiritual in Symbolism Professor Barbara Larson, University of West Florida & MacGeorge Fellow, University of Melbourne Darwinism, with its reliance on competition and random selection in nature, has been tied to materialism and atheism and was a major point of reference in certain scientific circles that excluded religious explanations behind the existence of living beings and the earth that supported them. However, the widespread acknowledgement of deep time and rejection of the limited historical scale of biblical creation even by the devout opened the stage to other ways of understanding the intentions of the Creator or how one might reconceptualize spiritual life. Darwinism, paradoxically, mobilized religious thought; evolutionism worked its way into theosophy, reenergized pantheism, and was folded into syncretic writings by certain Catholic authors. Darwin…

News | Outgoing NGV Director Gerard Vaughan appointed Professorial Fellow at Melbourne University

Gerard Vaughan appointed Professorial Fellow The University of Melbourne has announced today that the outgoing director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Dr Gerard Vaughan, has been appointed to a new post at the University of Melbourne, the Gerry Higgins Professorial Fellowship in Art History. The  Fellowship  has been created through the support of Mr Allan Myers AO QC. The Fellowship sits within the Faculty of Arts and the Dean, Professor Mark Considine, said Dr Vaughan’s leadership would contribute to the new Australian Institute of Art History’s role in research and advancement activities. Dr Vaughan is an almuni of Melbourne University, where he completed his Master’s thesis on French post-impressionism, and taught art history at before completing his doctorate at Oxford University. Dr Vaughan said “I look forward to returning to teaching and research, and this will provide me with a great opportunity to pursue…

Public Lecture | Enjoy Your Diversity: the 1960’s Revisited - Patrick McCaughey

Enjoy Your Diversity: the 1960’s Revisited Patrick McCaughey When Clem Greenberg came to Australia in 1968, he admired a lot of Australian painting, more the older moderns than the young mods. But his parting words were: “Enjoy your diversity.”  Few took much notice and the 60s has been generally characterised as the time of the young abstractionists with some pop thrown in, ending with the first bits and pieces of Conceptualism.  Indeed these were striking new forces on the landscape and so quickly embraced by the institutions.  Even the NGV bought from all those exciting first solo shows - Ball, Jacks, Hickey, Hunter etc.  The era did have a certain electricity to it: it was the decade of the sell out show and all those fiercely competitive art prizes.  I’d like to get some of that ‘electric’ feel across. But…

Lecture | The People’s Doge: The Cultural Milieu of the Grand Chancellors of Venice - Deborah Howard

The People’s Doge: The Cultural Milieu of the Grand Chancellors of Venice Professor Deborah Howard, The University of Cambridge and Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne This lecture explores the cultural significance of the Grand Chancellors of  Venice in the age of Titian. The Grand Chancellor was the head of the  chancery, or professional civil service, in the Doge’s Palace - the one  occupation strictly reserved for members of the cittadino class. Yet  surprisingly, unconventional family set-ups were no embarrassment, because success as a cittadino rested on individual merit rather than pure lineage. Educated, wealthy and ambitious, these high-ranking figures in the Venetian Republic used art and architecture ostentatiously for their personal  self-advancement . Professor Howard is Professor of Architectural History in the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. A graduate of Cambridge…

Lecture – Patrick McCaughey ‘In the end there is no such thing as art, only artists’

Public Lecture at The University of Melbourne Professor Patrick McCaughey ‘In the end there is no such thing as art, only artists’ In his lecture, Professor Patrick McCaughey will expatiate on the nature and significance of Art History - taking as his starting point the famous opening sentence from E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950), ‘In the end there is no such thing as art only artists.’ Patrick McCaughey studied Fine Arts and English at the University of Melbourne and became art critic of The Age in 1966. After a period in New York on a Harkness Fellowship, he was appointed Professor of Visual Arts at Monash University in 1972 and went on to become Director of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1981. He left Australia in 1988 and was successively director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in…

Lecture – Jane Wernwick ‘Engineering Delight – collaborations on projects to make you smile’

Melbourne School of Design -  Faculty of Architecture, Building & Planning,  The University of Melbourne Jane Wernick Jane Wernick Associates, Consulting Engineers, London Engineering Delight – collaborations on projects to make you smile Tuesday 3 August Jane Wernick, one of the masterminds behind London’s Millennium Wheel, will give an intimate and engaging insight into her extraordinary engineering projects and consultative practice. ‘The talk will describe how structural engineering solutions for our projects are developed as a result of a series of conversations between us, the client, and the other members of the design team,’ Jane says. It will focus on a number of projects which ‘bring delight’ to those who experience them, and will describe how the structural designs evolved. Jane Wernick (FREng Hon FRIBA FRSA CEng FIStructE FICE) is a structural engineer who likes to collaborate with architects and…