Author: rc566

Kostas Gravanis, who is undertaking a PhD in History and Philosophy of Art in the School of Arts, has just been accepted for a six-month internship in the Vatican Museums.

The Vatican Museums offer an education and training programme for young specialists and students in restoration techniques. Each intern is assigned to a specific project involved in the museum’s activities.

Beginning in April, Kostas will be working in the area of the Stanze di Raffaello (Raphael Rooms). The internship is directly related to Kostas’ PhD research, as his project is provisionally entitled ‘Sources, Functions and Meaning of Imagery in the Vatican’s Raphael Rooms’. His PhD supervisors are Professor Tom Henry and Dr Ben Thomas.

The Stanze are a series of reception rooms in the Vatican Palace, famous for their beautiful frescoes painted by Raphael and his workshop (1508-24). The internship will give Kostas the opportunity to get involved with projects for the forthcoming 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death in Rome as well as with on-going restoration work in the Sala di Costantino.

Commenting on the internship, Kostas said: ‘Working in the Stanze at this specific time is a great honour and privilege. The anticipation of Raphael year 2020 is a thrill beyond words while the restoration projects are revealing fascinating new aspects of Raphael’s art’.

Professor Tom Henry, Director of the Rome School of Classical and Renaissance Studies, also commented on Kostas’ achievement: ‘Kostas stood out on our MA in History of Art in Rome and developed his PhD topic while there. It is a tremendous achievement for him to now be offered this highly prestigious internship back in the Vatican Museums and at such an exciting moment.’

For more details on the Vatican Museum internships, please see the page here:
www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/musei-del-papa/stage.html

We are very excited to announce that on 1 April 2019 at 19:00 our very own Peter Brown, Professor of Medieval Literature and Academic Director of the Paris School of Arts and Cultures, will be delivering a talk on ‘Chaucer in Italy’ at the American University of Rome.

Synopsis:

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) was ahead of his time. Having visited Italy twice on diplomatic missions he modeled a significant number of his narratives on works by Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, long before these writers were ‘discovered’ during the English Renaissance. My lecture will consider Chaucer’s encounter with Italian culture and how it prompted a rebirth of his creative outlook.

Biography of our speaker:

Peter Brown is Professor of English Medieval Literature at the University of Kent and Academic Director of its Paris School of Arts and Culture. He has recently edited A New Companion to Chaucer (Wiley–Blackwell, 2019) and is the author of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has published on a wide range of topics to do with the cultural and historical context of medieval literature. 

Please go to https://aur.edu/events/chaucer-italy to register!

Photo: Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer from the Regiment of Princes by Thomas Hoccleve. London, British Library, MS Harley 4866, f. 88 (1411–12).

Happy New Year everyone!

Tom Henry writes:

Next year’s MA History of Art in Rome (2019-20) will be built around two great anniversaries and the exhibitions that will accompany them. 2019 marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death in France, and will be marked by a great exhibition at the Louvre in Paris (opens October 2019). 2020 is the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death in Rome and there are going to be great exhibitions in Rome (spring 2020) and in London (autumn 2020, I am co-curating this exhibition). Kent’s Rome School of Classical and Renaissance Studies is putting these anniversaries at the centre of our events and our teaching. I will be teaching first Leonardo (autumn 2019) and then Raphael (spring 2020), and have been asked to give a major lecture linking Raphael and Leonardo. It should be an exciting year.

Tom Henry ^[1], Professor of History of Art in the School of Arts ^[2] and Director of the Rome School of Classical and Renaissance Studies ^[3], has delivered an online lecture for the Think Kent ^[4] series entitled ‘Men in Black: How to Interpret Raphael’s Self-Portrait with a Friend in the Louvre’, which is now available on YouTube ^[5].

The Think Kent lectures are a series of TED talk-style lectures produced with the intention of raising awareness of the research and teaching expertise of Kent academics and the international impact of their work.

The lecture follows on from Tom’s curation of an exhibition held at both the Louvre ^[6] in Paris and the Museo del Prado ^[7] in Madrid, entitled ‘Raphaël à Rome: les dernières années‘, focusing on the final years of the renaissance painter and architect.

The lecture discussed one painting, Raphael’s Self-Portrait with a Friend (c.1519-20), completed shortly before the artist’s death in 1520. Tom argues that to interpret the picture, it is necessary to understand the range of the painter’s activities in his last few years.

In particular, the identity of the second figure in the painting is unknown; however, Tom argues that he is the Italian painter and architect Giulio Romano, a pupil of Raphael, and he develops this argument with a discussion of the role of cloak-giving in artistic adoption and inheritance in the Renaissance period.

The talk may be viewed below or on YouTube via the link:
https://youtu.be/M3zNDnTXkBw