Tag Archive for Venetian Art

Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Adam Bushby, ‘El Gran Turco: Ottoman Turks in Venetian painting, 1453-1571′

Gentile Bellini (attr.), Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II (1480). National Gallery, London.

Ottoman Turks often appear in Venetian painting between the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the defeat of the Turkish navy by the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. The relationship between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire is typically understood through commercial trade, naval battles and religious differences. This paper examines the representation of Ottoman Turks in Venetian painting, including portraiture, identifying a trend of increasingly negative representations, and discussing the extent to which pictorial changes reflected political and commercial changes in the Mediterranean. Venue: Dulcie Hollyock Room, Ground Floor, Baillieu Library (Building 177), University of Melbourne, Parkville (map). Date: Monday 11 August, 6:30pm.

Exhibition Review | Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice | David Packwood

Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) 'The Family of Darius before Alexander', 1565-7 Oil on canvas. 236.2 x 474.9 cm © The National Gallery, London

Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice David Packwood Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice is on at the National Gallery, London, 2014 until the 15th June 2014. It was written,  then, on my page in the Book of Fate that at two in the afternoon of the sixth day of June in the year 2014 that I, along with a friend, should attend an exhibition of Paolo Veronese for the first time within the hallowed halls of the London, National Gallery. “Veronese” is no longer just a name to me, or a reproduction in a book, or a digital image floating on a computer screen. In this exhibition I begin to grasp the man behind the banquets, the purveyor of large altarpieces,…

Lecture | Paul Hills ‘Varieties of Venetian Colour: Titian and Veronese’

Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1515-18, Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice.

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…

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

Titian, 'Madonna and Child in a landscape', c.1507  oil on wood panel, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo Legacy of Guglielmo Lochis 1866 Photo via NGA website.

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…

EVCS: Carl Villis ‘Giambattista Tiepolo, Francesco Algarotti and The Finding of Moses’

Giambattista Tiepolo The finding of Moses (formerly attributed to Sebastiano Ricci).

The European Visual Culture Seminar presents: Carl Villis, Conservator of Paintings before 1800, National Gallery of Victoria Giambattista Tiepolo, Francesco Algarotti and The Finding of Moses in the National Gallery of Victoria Between 1958 and 2008, the NGV’s large eighteenth-century Venetian canvas The Finding of Moses carried an attribution to Sebastiano Ricci. In 2009 this was changed to Giambattista Tiepolo after an extended technical examination and a major conservation treatment. This talk will trace the long history of the ‘new’ Tiepolo attribution, and will introduce the theory that the work is another product of the fruitful collaboration between Tiepolo and his friend and patron, Count Francesco Algarotti. Date: Monday 28 March 2021 6:30 pm Venue: Room 150 Elisabeth Murdoch Building,…

Review ‘Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals’

Fig. 1 Canaletto 'The Torre di Malghera' about 1756

Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals The exhibition finished at the National Gallery, London, on 16 January 2011. It runs at the National Gallery, Washington, from 20 February to 30 May 2011. Reviewed by David R. Marshall Canaletto is synonymous with Venetian view painting, and when you enter this exhibition you can see why: it looks like room after room of Canalettos. But gradually this impression resolves itself into several different painters and manners. Some have lamented the lack of the chronological organisation that informs most recent Canaletto and Bellotto exhibitions, but that would miss the point: this is an exhibition about comparisons, and the curator, Charles Beddington, has set up many interesting ones. However, when I saw it, on a…