The 50th Anniversary events and Rome centre launch last Wednesday, including a spectacular party at the Borghese Gallery with HA students acting as expert guides, were all very successful. Deputy VC Keith Mander gave a speech to the assembled dignitaries in the Borghese about the University’s first 50 years, and there was a very optimistic feel about the continuing success of the University on the European stage and the great potential that Kent’s centre in Rome was opening up for subjects like HA and Archaeology (among others).
The Raphael conference held at AUR was very well-attended by a distinguished audience throughout the afternoon and saw cutting-edge research from leading Raphael scholars – including Paul Joannides, David Ekserdjian, Linda Wolk-Simon, Claire Van Cleave and Sheryl Reiss – as well as papers from Kent’s HA department and our partner department at AUR. Several delegates had travelled from the enormous Renaissance Society of America conference at Berlin and it felt like the AUR conference could easily have been a session continuing over from that major international conference.
The conference was preceded by a field trip to Villa Lante – now the Finnish embassy – to view the fresco decorations by members of Raphael’s school and to discuss various problems posed by their interesting recycling of motifs from Raphael’s own works. The following day delegates from the conference visited a Bernini drawings exhibition and decided that the Barberini’s ‘La Fornarina’ is not a Raphael painting!
Prof. Tom Henry deserves our congratulations for such a successful event that did so much to enhance the reputation of the department.
Photographs by Darren Ellis.
