Tag: 17th Century Art

Lecture | ‘Re-visiting Peter Lely’: a Dutch painter in seventeenth-century London – Diana Dethloff | University of Melbourne

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Peter Lely's Portrait of Sir John Rous

The Dutch-born artist Peter Lely was an important figure in seventeenth-century British portrait painting. His position as Principal Painter at the court of Charles II, and his portraits of royal mistresses and privileged courtiers have, for many, come to define the Restoration period, as well as earning Lely the reputation of being nothing more than a fashionable face painter. This lecture aims to present a more balanced assessment of an artist who enjoyed a working life of almost forty years, only half of which were as royal painter, and examines Lely’s work during the earlier periods of English civil war and Commonwealth government, in addition to that for the Restoration Court. As well as arguing for a more balanced view of this interesting and prolific artist, this discussion will provide a useful context for the National Gallery of Victoria’s own Lely portrait…

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Exhibition | An illumination: the Rothschild Prayer Book and other works from the Kerry Stokes Collection | Ian Potter Museum of Art

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A new exhibition opening at the Ian Potter Museum of this Art provides an opportunity for Melbourne audiences to see art from the Kerry Stokes Collection, including the famous Rothschild Prayer Book. The exhibition is curated by Emeritus Professor Margaret Manion and brings together paintings, stained glass, polychrome sculpture and other art dating from between 1280 and 1685. Mr Stokes has built his collection of illuminated manuscripts over the past forty years, though many of the works included in this exhibition, such as the Pieter Breughel the Younger painting Calvary (1615), are more recent acquisitions stimulated by his recent purchase of the Rothschild Prayer Book (c. 1505 – 1510 ) in early January 2014. The Rothschild Prayer Book is a masterpiece of Flemish Renaissance art and it is considered one of the finest illuminated manuscripts in private hands. It was…

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News | NGV winter exhibition ‘Masterpieces from The Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great’

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The NGV has announced this year’s Melbourne Winter Masterpiece exhibition will be ‘Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great’. From one great empire to another – last year we took in the Royal Collection of the Hapsburg’s of Spain in ‘Italian Masterieces from the Prado‘, this winter we look to Russia and the  collection of Catherine the Great. The Hermitage holds one of the most important collections of European Art and one of the largest collections of art anywhere in the world. This exhibition will highlight the collection as it was drawn together by Catherine the Great. She founded the Hermitage in 1764, but she had begun to collect pictures from the moment she ascended to the throne in 1762. The works coming out for this exhibition range in date from artists who would have been ‘old…

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Exhibition Review | Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court | Katrina Grant

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Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court, Museo del Prado Reviewed by Katrina Grant The exhibition runs until until 31st August 2014 at the NGV International, St Kilda Rd. This exhibition tells two stories. The first is the story of Italian art from Raphael to Tiepolo and the second is the story of Spanish engagement with Italian art over this period. The exhibition highlights the close artistic relationship between Italy and Spain in the Early Modern period. It includes paintings that were directly commissioned by the Spanish Royal family from such artists as Titian, as well as works collected a century or more after they were painted, such as the Holy Family by Raphael. There are also works by artists who travelled to Spain to undertake commissions in various royal residences. And, of course, there are paintings by a number 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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Lecture | Dr Barbara Gaehtgens on Rembrandt’s Abduction of Ganymede | Sydney Intellectual History Network

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Looking Closely: Interpreting Rembrandt’s Abduction of Ganymede Dr Barbara Gaehtgens An ‘Undoing the Ancient’ FASS Collaborative Research Group Event Special Lecture by Dr Barbara Gaehtgens The abduction of Ganymede 1635 – an early work by Rembrandt van Rijn – has puzzled many generations of Rembrandt scholars. The painting illustrates the classical Greek myth of the abduction of Ganymede, most beautiful of male mortals, by an eagle-guised Zeus, who desires the beautiful youth as his cup bearer. The theme was not new in art and had been represented by many other artists, including Michelangelo and Peter Paul Rubens. Rembrandt’s representation is unusual, however, in that Ganymede is not a beautiful, ephebic nude but a screaming, urinating toddler, dressed in a linen smock, who is squirming to free himself from the scarf in which the eagle is carrying him. An independent art…

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Seminar | Visual Manipulation and Auto/Biography | Sydney Intellectual History Network

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Visual Manipulation and Auto/Biography The first seminar for 2014 in Auto/Biography and History series sponsored by the Global Sensibilities Group within the Sydney Intellectual History Network at the University of Sydney. Barbara Gaehtgens | 1643 or How to Represent the Queen’s New Power? Mark De Vitis | Madame as the Marquise: The Politics of Making a Mockery at the Court of Louis XIV This seminar will combine the work of two art historians researching the visual self-representation of royal woman at the French court during the seventeenth century. Dr Gaehtgens (an independent scholar based at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles) explores how Anne of Austria used multiplied images as visual propaganda to change her image from a widowed queen to a self-assured regent. In turn, Dr De Vitis (National Art School) considers the theatrical performances of Elizabeth Charlotte…

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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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Symposium | Iconoclasm | University of Melbourne, September 6th

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ICONOCLASM – A Symposium Symposium to be chaired by Dr Gerard Vaughan, Gerry Higgins Professorial Fellow Conveners: Dr F Harley-McGowan, Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Medieval Art History  Dr Justin Clemens, Senior Lecturer, English School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne The history of images is inseparable from the history of the hostility towards images. In its most extreme expressions, this hostility can become an injunction to the breaking of all images: iconoclasm. Sometimes certain images or kinds of image have been banned from being made, circulated, or exhibited; sometimes all images are held to be available for destruction; sometimes images themselves incorporate various kinds of auto-hostility; sometimes images are made only to be broken; sometimes images that should be broken never are. Justifications for iconoclasm can likewise be of many kinds: religious, economic, social, aesthetic, philosophical. This symposium takes…

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Seminar | ‘Space, Memory, Narrative: The Oratorians and the Memorialization of San Filippo Neri in Rome, Florence and Naples’ Glenys L. Adams

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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,…

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Lecture | The passions of the soul – Emotion in the paintings of Nicholas Poussin , Lisa Beaven

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The passions of the soul – Emotion in the paintings of Nicholas Poussin Lisa Beaven The restoration of the NGV’s Crossing of the Red Sea provides us with a timely opportunity to re-evaluate its creator, Nicolas Poussin. He is one of the most studied, but also one of the most misunderstood, of seventeenth-century artists. Traditionally he has been seen as a strict classicist who valued reason above all else. And yet in a series of paintings from the 1640s, such as Landscape with a man killed by a Snake, idyllic landscapes not only fail to deliver the safety they seem to promise, but instead bring violence and death. The expression of extreme states of emotion, not reasoning, is at the heart of these works, and Lisa will argue that they represent a direct response to his immediate intellectual environment The…

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Seminar | La bella sirena: Portraits of female musicians in seventeenth-century Italy, Mark Shepheard

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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…

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

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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…

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

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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 viewers. Lecture presented by the ARC Centre of Excellence…

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