Lectures start at 20.00, the bar opens at 19.30
13th March 2012
“Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’ – fact or fiction?”
by Caroline Brook
Giorgio Vasari was a painter, architect, artistic impresario and collector whose activities have been overshadowed by his role as the most important biographer of Italian Renaissance artists. In this lecture I consider Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’ in relation to his own life as a court artist who spent most of his career in the employ of Cosimo 1, Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lecture takes into account the personal motivations and aspirations that underlie the project, and shows how the author’s account of the lives and works of individual artists reveal much about the petty jealousies, rivalries and ambitions that dominated the artistic scene in Florence during the period. Ultimately it aims to show how the ‘Lives’ stand as an enduring testament to the prevailing belief in the importance of art as a means of fashioning both personal and civic identity in Italy during the sixteenth century. |
10th April 2012
“Pre-Raphaelitism – an international art movement?”
by Ann Anderson
As Britain enjoys the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite works ever brought together. This lecture attempts to establish Pre-Raphaelitism as the most important school of British Painting, rivalling French Impressionism in terms of its influence. The original Brotherhood of 1848-53 initiated three generations of British Pre-Raphaelites. Moreover the movement was not confined to England, as across Europe Pre-Raphaelitism evolved into symbolism. Without Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edwards Burne-Jones there would have been no Mackintosh in Glasgow, Klimt in Vienna or Knopff in Brussels. Oscar Wilde rightly perceived ‘Art is at once surface and symbol’; he also warned that those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril.
This lecture will go below the surface of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, to reveal not only the symbols but also the stories and tales of Chivalric love. The Pre-Raphaelites hold us enthralled as we are hooked by their personal melodramas as well as their ravishing paintings.
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