Events

Location: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rom

Proxy Wooings and Weddings. From Shakespeare to Rubens

Henriette Hertz Lecture
Why does Rubens’s painting of the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV lack a portrait of the groom? This paper explores the history of the proxy wedding and the theoretical problems raised by such ceremonies when confronted with expectations of affective bonds between spouses. [more]

Giorgio de Chirico and the Modern Literary Imagination

Lecture
A painter poet and a poet’s painter, Giorgio de Chirico arguably influenced the 20th century literary imagination more than any other modernist artist. This lecture considers why his art entranced the American poets John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Mark Strand. [more]

Fumetti underground tra ricerca e festival mainstream

Workshop
Questo Workshop pone a tema diverse tendenze storiche e contemporanee del fumetto underground, riunendo prospettive di ricerca accademica, attività creativa e divulgazione attraverso eventi culturali di portata nazionale e internazionale. Contenitore elastico, il fumetto underground indica sia una categoria estetica adatta ad esprimere diverse istanze autoriali (genere e tradizione di riferimento sul piano narrativo e visuale, esplorazione di determinati contenuti, stilistica), che una serie di pratiche di produzione e distribuzione alternative alla stampa istituzionale che esercitano una sostanziale influenza sul mondo del fumetto mainstream. [more]

Seeing like Dante: Similis and the Reader's Eye

Research Seminar
In this illustrated lecture, Bill Sherman will introduce his recent work on reading—and readers’ responses—as a visual rather than verbal phenomenon. Between the 13th and 17th centuries, in fact, there are all kinds of overlooked traces of visual responses to texts, from isolated doodles to fully fledged illustrative schemes. But we have never really known what to do with them, or even what to call them. [more]
Brancusi’s work Maiastra will be the starting point of a reflection on the perception and reception of artworks inspired by folk tales and national mythologies in early 20th Century Balkans. [more]

The Voices, Sounds, and Images of Europe

Interdisciplinary Conference
Organised within the framework of the European Pavilion in Rome and dedicated to the many voices, languages and images that make up Europe, this afternoon at Bibliotheca Hertziana is divided into three programmes that combine presentations, listening sessions and exchanges with the guests and amongst the audience. [more]
The Technical Study of Bernini’s Bronzes is a collaborative multi-disciplinary project that has begun a comprehensive technical study of all of Bernini’s complete oeuvre in bronze. In the past year, the travelling team has studied bronzes in North American and Australian museums and will continue technical studies in Europe in 2023-2026. [more]
Inspired by Nietzsche’s remark that "madness in individuals is somewhat rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule", the book studies the representation of mental disorders across the media, ancient and modern. [more]

Research Seminar Series: "Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins"

1. Research Seminar: “Integration through Exhibition. On Large-scale Art Shows in Cold-War Divided Europe”
Speaking of Europe often presupposes the existence of a stable unity of people with a common history, culture and identity. Yet it is not only the current political crisis that reveals major imbalances within the continent, where the gap between ‘West’ and ‘East’ looms particularly large. This series of research seminars offers the opportunity to read Europe's East from a historical perspective, in its relationship to other European regions, some of them (self-)declared as the center, as well as to the neighboring continent of Asia. [more]
The research seminar is dedicated to public monuments and the way they reflect and construct historical narratives. Its focus lies on the case study of Belarus, where contemporary artists engage with official monumental sculpture through critical interventions. [more]
In light of shifting theoretical paradigms in art history, reflecting on methods and their cultural frameworks is crucial and urgent. Contemporary efforts to evolve beyond the power relations of center and periphery and to redefine the relations between ideas, things, people, spaces and temporalities are fostered by current societal and political changes. From this arises the demand for an awareness of the intellectual genealogies and ideological implications of art historical methods. [more]

Screening & Artist Talk with Mykola Ridnyi

This film seminar presents a screening of Mykola Ridnyi’s film Temerari and its research material, followed by an artist talk and public discussion. Russia’s attack on its neighbor is driven by a nationalist ideology, yet Russian propaganda justifies the invasion as one aimed against “fascists”. Mykola Ridnyi’s film Temerari (21 min, 2021) tackles this subject. [more]

Parures et Parades: Being Signare in Senegal around 1800

Lecture
The lecture will focus on material culture, that is, the objects in use and the representations of an exceptional community: the Signares, mixed-race women from Saint-Louis du Sénégal and the island of Gorée, who, through their matrimonial alliances with European merchants, formed an elite. [more]
Quali sono le qualità attribuite allo spazio, a quello della città, degli edifici, dei musei, nella lenta costituzione di una “identità nazionale” italiana durante l’Ottocento fino agli anni del fascismo? In che modo la spazialità contribuisce a forgiare l’identità? [more]
Reign or colony? Charles V’s succession to the Spanish Crown (1516) and the inclusion of Sicily into the domains of the empire visibly affected the socio-political and cultural conditions of the island. These transformations were mirrored in the artistic and architectonical production of Cinquecento and the beginning of the Seicento, and may be interpreted both as manifestations or consequences to the Hapsburg presence on the island, and as forms of expression of local communities' identities. [more]
In light of shifting theoretical paradigms in art history, reflecting on methods and their cultural frameworks is crucial and urgent. Contemporary efforts to evolve beyond the power relations of center and periphery and to redefine the relations between ideas, things, people, spaces and temporalities are fostered by current societal and political changes. From this arises the demand for an awareness of the intellectual genealogies and ideological implications of art historical methods. [more]

Ad tartaros: Art in Italy and Mongol Asia circa 1300

Lecture
The thirteenth-century rise of the Mongol Empire brought objects, peoples, and technologies into new and accelerated contact. This lecture explores the impact of this contact in Italian states around 1300, at a moment of intense artistic change. [more]
The panel seeks to explore the visuality of the Russian-Ukrainian War, how its images are constructed and distributed, how they function within the social and political contexts, how they shape and transform those contexts, what antagonisms, continuities and discontinuities they create. [more]

The Fragility of Pastel

Workshop
Pastel is a difficult medium for art history. Its origin is obscure, its classification complex, its status suspended between painting and drawing, between preparatory and finished work. One thing about pastel is clear, though: its extreme susceptibility to damage. [more]

The "Safe Outward Journey" of Rosalba Carriera’s Pastels and the Protection of the Three Kings

Keynote Lecture - part of the Workshop "The Fragility of Pastel"
Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757) was known throughout Europe for her extraordinary works in pastel. She was the most celebrated woman artist in eighteenth-century Venice. Apprehensive about her paintings’ well-being, Rosalba was anxious to protect them during their perilous journeys to their patrons and secure their future survival. [more]

Transparent Visuality: the Micaceous Image in Early Modern Europe

Research Seminar
Extracted in Siberia and moved in Anglo-Russian trade, the foliaceous mineral muscovite (white mica) fed the imaginations of early modern painters, poets, and natural philosophers alike. This seminar will focus on a group of micaceous objects — portrait overlays, embroidered cabinets, scientific instruments, and a perspective treatise — that dramatize a culture of interaction between art and science, amateurs and experts, foreign travel and domesticity in the long seventeenth century. [more]
In light of shifting theoretical paradigms in art history, reflecting on methods and their cultural frameworks is crucial and urgent. Contemporary efforts to evolve beyond the power relations of center and periphery and to redefine the relations between ideas, things, people, spaces and temporalities are fostered by current societal and political changes. From this arises the demand for an awareness of the intellectual genealogies and ideological implications of art historical methods. [more]

Embodying Europe in the Early-Modern Period

Research Seminar
In the early-modern period, a vibrant debate about Europe’s political fate, its borders, and its identity emerged. While travelogues enhanced the knowledge of non-European cultures, the growing news media contributed to the discourse on Europe as well by reporting continuously on its contemporary history. [more]
Recent progress in the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities have made it possible to connect Vision and Language together in a variety of different tasks which lie at the intersection of Vision, Language, and Embodied AI. Those tasks range from retrieving images or part of images given textual queries, to generating meaningful descriptions of images, answering questions and navigating agents in unseen environments via natural language instructions. [more]

Art to Numbers - Ph.D. Seminar

Ph.D. seminar
Practical implementation and theoretical analysis of visual similarity in the context of (digital) art history, with a short hands-on introduction to the ImageGraph tool and invites participants to discuss how digital methods can assist art historical research methodologies. [more]

La Cappella Sansevero a Napoli. Raimondo di Sangro e la cultura del barocco romano

Research Seminar
Raimondo di Sangro (1710-1771), settimo principe di Sansevero e committente della Cappella Sansevero a Napoli, si formò a Roma presso i gesuiti. Tale esperienza fu cruciale per la sua vicenda intellettuale, e finì per determinare il programma figurativo del suo tempio gentilizio. [more]

'The Unbreakable Wall'. Saint Sophia in Kyiv, between War and Politics

Research Seminar
The event is meant as a conversation on the cultural and political conditions affecting the study, conservation and symbolic value of a major extant monument from Kyivan Rus’: the Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Kyiv. Selected scholars will present and participate in discussions on Russophone historiography and the monument’s latest life as a museum and as a symbol of national identity, in light of recent rumors about war dangers threatening the church. [more]
What happens to a “factory of dreams” in times of war? Cinecittà, the Fascist-built Hollywood-on-the-Tiber, played a key role in the havoc of battle and occupation and post-World War II reconstruction. [more]
1960s-1970s countercultural practices have often raised a dilemma, within or against institutions? Over the past decades, many artists and cultural workers have explored an alternative, the creation of countercultural institutions. [more]

The Smell of Paint: Towards an Olfactory History of 19th-Century Painting

Research Seminar
Since the publishing of De Collica pictonum (1757) by the famous physician Tronchin, there have been numerous publications and debates about the medical dangers attributed to the smell of paint. At the turn of the century, while the manufacture of colors was gradually industrialized, this threat played an important role in the material culture by encouraging the development of many odorless paints and varnishes. [more]
Questo research seminar si incentra su alcuni fenomeni emergenti nell’ambito della Controcultura italiana tra anni Settanta e Ottanta. [more]

Film Seminar "La rivoluzione siamo noi (Arte in Italia 1967 – 1977)"

Film Seminar
Il film La rivoluzione siamo noi (Arte in Italia 1967-1977), prodotto e distribuito da Luce-Cinecittà, sarà proiettato nel Villino Stroganoff seguito da una discussione con la regista (Ilaria Freccia), l’autore (Ludovico Pratesi) e la Presidente di Cinecittà (Chiara Sbarigia). [more]
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