A lecture series to accompany the current exhibition of art from the Kerry Stokes collection on at the Ian Potter Museum of Art. See the website to register for individual lectures. All lectures are free to attend.
Tuesday 8 September 2020 | 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Kate Challis | Down the Rabbit Hole: An intimate look at Rothschild Prayer Book within a new era of art production and society
The Rothschild Prayer Book has been called “exceptional”, “exquisite”, “legendary” and “one of the most important manuscripts to be offered at auction”. This lecture reveals the reasons for these accolades by providing an intimate look at the miniatures and borders. Central to appreciating the Rothschild Prayer Book is an understanding of its historical context. Interior designer Dr Kate Challis will take the audience on a journey divulging central questions regarding the book’s content, its purpose and the fascinating subject of how the Rothschild Prayer Book came into being and will culminate in an understanding of what this manuscript reveals about the changing circumstances of both society and art production at the beginning of the 16th century.
Wednesday 9 Septembe r2015 | 1:00 PM - 2:00
Libby Melzer and Grace Pundyk | Parchment: from Medieval goats to Tasmanian marsupials
This talk will discuss the Medieval material parchment from two different perspectives. Libby will address parchment’s role as an archaeological resource, the analysis of which can inform our knowledge of the circumstances of the production of Medieval manuscripts as well as regional farming and manufacturing practises. Libby will discuss the methodologies for interpreting parchment through the example of two Glossed Bible books dating from the late 13th and early 14th centuries in the collection of the State Library of Victoria. Though these manuscripts are similar in their genre and purpose, the circumstances of their production are greatly different and this is manifest in various ways the parchment has been used.
Grace’s discussion will focus on her current parchment-making practice and the various processes she has engaged with – some gleaned from those of Medieval parchment makers, others with a decidedly 21st century and Australian twist – over the two years she has been working with parchment and skin. She will also try and explain how, one day in mid-2013, she came to the conclusion that it would not only be a good idea to teach herself how to make parchment, but that the skins from which the parchment is made should be sourced only from ‘roadkill’ marsupials in north-west Tasmania.
Tuesday 15 September 2020 | 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Dagmar Eichberger | ‘Women who read are dangerous’: Illuminated manuscripts and female book collections in the Early Renaissance
According to late medieval educational treatises, virtuous woman were advised to read morally uplifting texts and were told to stay away from light or even frivolous reading. As is well known, theory and practice are not always identical. Renaissance women not only studied their lavishly illustrated books of hours – such as the famous Rothschild Prayerbook but also indulged in reading romance and love poetry. Many welleducated women of the high nobility were interested in contemporary politics and kept abreast of the latest discoveries.
Reading and spending time on a book was considered a leisure activity that usually took place in the most secluded space of the house, the bedroom or the private study. Very few residences had a proper library with shelves and reading desks. This was the case with the residence of Archduchess Margaret of Austria (1480-1530), Regent of the Netherlands, who lived in the city of Mechelen. She was the aunt and godmother of the future Emperor Charles V, head of the House of Habsburg. Margaret employed several court artists, among others the famous Gerard Horenbout (1464-1541) from Ghent. When illuminating the unfinished Sforza Hours, he closely followed her instructions.
This lecture investigates the range of possibilities bibliophile women had to satisfy their interest in books, as art objects, gifts and repositories of knowledge.
Tuesday 22 September 2020 | 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Bernard Muir | Chrysalis to Butterfly: The Evolution of the Book of Hours from Manuscript to Print
This lecture examines the continuities and transformations undergone by the Book of Hours as it progressed from a primarily manuscript culture to the Age of Print, as evidenced by three sixteenthcentury illuminated printed books held in Victorian collections, such as The State Library of Victoria, The Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, and the University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library. Specific attention will be paid to the admixture of sacred and secular images in the marginal panels of the of the Baillieu and Ballarat Hours; the SLV’s book will serve principally as an example of a printed Hours which emulates a manuscript Hours in preserving their appearance; as such, it stands in contrast to the Baillieu and Ballarat Hours in its conservatism, while sharing some innovative features with the printed books.
Of particular interest in the Ballarat Hours is its series of illustrations of Josephus’ Jewish Wars, a very popular work throughout the Middle Ages that survives in a number of French versions in addition to the Latin; the Duc de Berry owned a finely illustrated copy of this work. A series of captions in medieval French accompanying the illustrations of the Jewish Wars are identified and commented upon here for the first time. The Baillieu Hours includes an interesting series of ‘Dance of Death’ images in its border panels, as well as typological images configured to mirror their presentation in the earlier woodblock Biblia Pauperum.
Monday 28 Septembe r2015 | 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Callum Reid and Elaine Shaw | Two fifteenth century items from the Kerry Stokes Collection
An Associate of the Jouvenal Master and the Breviary of Prior Francois Robert presented by Dr Elaine Shaw The artist responsible for the illumination of the Breviary, Use of Rome, in the Kerry Stokes Collection, Lib.2006.092, belongs to a group who decorated and illustrated devotional works, such as Breviaries, Book of Hours and Psalters. He also worked in a style associated with the Jouvenal Master, who is named for the illumination of the Mare Historiarum, BnF, ms lat. 4915, which was made in 1448-9 for Guillaume Jouvenal des Ursins, Chancellor of France. The Breviary bears an ownership inscription and the coat-of-arms of François Robert, Prior of the College of Canons of St-Cyr at Issoudun, Diocese of Bourges, in the province of Berry. This lecture will discuss several works by the Jouvenal Master and his associates to situate Lib. 2006.092, now named for Prior François Robert, within this corpus, and to demonstrate that the so-called ‘Jouvenal Group’ operated for patrons over quite a large area of regional France. Within this context attention will be given generally to the borders in all the works under discussion, and particularly to several miniatures from the Breviary of Prior Francois Robert.
Thursday 8 October 2020 |6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Larry Silver | Crucifixion by Breughel the Younger
The important largescale Crucifixion panel by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, now on view at the Potter Museum of Art from the Kerry Stokes Collection in Perth, displays a multitude of figures against a vast panoramic landscape. It is the finest of eight closely related versions of this subject by Pieter the Younger, and it almost certainly points to a missing original by his more celebrated father and namesake, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
A survey of the events depicted in the Stokes panel reveals that this is the kind of “figure-rich” Crucifixion, whose popularity expanded in painting of the late Middle Ages, beginning in Germany with the Cologne School of the early fifteenth century but also adopted by Netherlandish artists, such as Dutch engraver Lucas van Leyden. Its particular sensibility, of seeing Gospel events anachronistically as if in the present, stems from the painter’s father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. His also is this original composition of figures, now copied with exactitude of replication by his son, Pieter the Younger. Moreover, the absence of firearms and the costume fashions for soldiers also point to a mid-sixteenth-century origin. It also contrasts with the larger figures and striking colors of the versions by Peter the Younger’s brother, Jan Brueghel.
The Stokes panel holds great fascination in its own right as the finest version of the Crucifixion composition produced in the workshop of Pieter Bruegel the Younger. Its range of figures continues to draw our attention before their expansive mountaintop landscape of Golgotha. But this painting holds added importance in being the finest suggestion we have of a missing masterpiece, a work that boldly mixes religious narrative with the emerging elements of both genre activity and landscape setting. We do truly come to the father through the son.
Tuesday 13 October 2020 | 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Miya Tokumitsu | An Accessory of Intellect: Reflections on a Renaissance Writing Casket
Before the cubicle and the corner office, there was the Renaissance study, or studio, a space for private contemplation, study, and writing. Like its progeny, the Renaissance study was not merely an enclosure for mental work, but also a repository of precious things: books, seals, pens, and their containers. For patrons eager to adorn their intellectual retreats, Renaissance artisans made exquisite small objects, often with esoteric allegorical or mythological motifs. The bronze writing casket of c. 1500 in the Kerry Stokes collection is a study accessory made to circulate in some of the most exclusive spaces of the humanist élite. Bearing the arms of Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini (1439–1503), later Pope Pius III, it emerges from the inner sanctums of European power as a compelling object of intellectual self-fashioning during the Renaissance.
Wednesday 21 October 2020 | 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Hilary Maddocks | The Book of Hours in Print: A Floor Talk
Books of hours were personal prayer books widely used by the laity during the late Middle Ages. Illustration was intrinsic to the devotional function of the book of hours, and many were illuminated with beautiful miniatures. The exquisite Rothschild Prayer Book, the centre piece of the Stokes exhibition, is one of the most splendid manuscript books of hours ever made. But what happened to books of hours when printing was introduced in the late 15th century? While books in manuscript were still produced, literally thousands of editions of books of hours also poured from the printing presses of Paris and other cities. Several books of hours printed in Paris in the early 16th century are displayed in the exhibition. This floor talk describes these books, their patronage and decorative programs.
Thursday 29 October 2020 | 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Margaret Manion | The Rothschild Prayer Book and the Book of Hours
The Rothschild Prayer Book is famous for its beautiful illumination and fine miniatures by many of the leading artists of the day. It is an outstanding example of the Northern Renaissance. It is also part of a much older tradition of the Book of Hours. This lecture will place the Rothschild Prayerbook within this tradition, and will show how its form, structure and the program of illustrations are part of a daily ritual of prayer for the laity that owes its origin to monastic practice.
Wednesday 4 November 2020 | 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Kay Sutton | Heaven and Earth: the Worlds of the Rothschild Prayer Book
With more than 150 pages painted by leading Flemish artists, the Rothschild Prayerbook is one of the most luxurious manuscripts of the Renaissance: its production would have been both extremely complex and extremely costly and its near perfect condition suggests that it has been as highly valued through the five centuries from its completion as it is today. Yet nothing is known of the book before it entered the Rothschild collection in Vienna at the end of the 1860s, and there is no evidence of its early history outside the pages of the manuscript itself. Fortunately, as well as being fantastic works of art, the illuminated borders and scenes are a rich source of information and present a wide picture of contemporary life, from manual labour to the golden extravagance of the court, and they provide clues to the circumstances of the manuscript’s production and use. Exploring these and considering the possibilities they suggest will be the subject of this lecture.
Tuesday 10 November 2020 | 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Charles Zika | The Kerry Stokes Schembart Book: Festivity, Fashion and Family in the Late Medieval Nuremberg Carnival
Schembart was the name given to the carnival parade held in the city of Nuremberg on the day before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the church season of Lent. In the late middle ages Nuremberg was a wealthy economic and cultural centre in the Germanspeaking Holy Roman Empire, and its carnival was one of the most extravagant. It is also the best known, because of the Schembart books created by its leading families between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This lecture will focus on the richly illustrated Schembart book in the Kerry Stokes collection, with reference to some of the other eighty manuscripts that survive. These record the sixty-five carnival parades held between 1449 and 1539, the year when they were permanently banned. They depict the different costumes of the so-called Runners who danced their way through the city, the floats that were pulled to the town square and ritually destroyed, and other pranksters and revelers dressed in exotic costumes. These manuscripts testify to the central role of carnival in the city’s festive life, the use of fashion and display in supporting the status of its leading families, and their emotional investment in ensuring that memories of carnival survived.