Art Historian and Curator, and Reader at the School of Arts, Dr Ben Thomas, has published a new book, co-edited with Catherine Whistler from the Ashmolean Museum, titled, ‘Raphael: Drawing and Eloquence‘ (Accademia Raffaello – Urbino 2020). Together, they previously co-curated the exhibition Raphael: The Drawings (2017) at the Ashmolean Museum, and Dr Ben Thomas subsequently curated the exhibition Drawing Together at the Courtauld Gallery (2017-18).
The book will launch at an online event taking place at the Italian Cultural Institute on Monday 21st December at 5pm. The event will include a series of original insights from leading experts of Raphael including Angelamaria Aceto (Ashmolean Museum), Francesco P. Di Teodoro (Polytechnic of Turin), David Love (independent scholar), Ita MacCarthy (University of Durham), Marzia Faietti (Uffizi and Visiting Scientist at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max-Planck-Institut), Christian K. Kleinbub (Ohio State University) and Alexandra Kocsis (independent art historian).
The essays in this new book, “develop in different ways the claim that a focus on Raphael’s drawings as material objects that are eloquent in themselves reveals a less classical, more approachable and emotional artist. For some authors the detailed technical analysis of the drawings has led to new discoveries about the layered approach to design that these fragile sheets of paper embody, while others have explored what the drawings signified in a culture saturated with rhetorical concepts.”