2013

January

Wednesday, January 30, 6:00 pm
“Portrait as Trophy: Three Imperial Busts by Leone Leoni”

Speakers: Jonathan Marsden, Royal Collection, London
Ticket/entry details: Free; no reservations necessary
Organized by: The Frick Collection
Location: The Music Room at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th St, New York, NY
Website: http://www.frick.org/calendar/index.htm
Additional information: 
Around 1555 the Duke of Alba commissioned three life-sized bronze busts by the great Italian Renaissance portraitist Leone Leoni: one of himself and the other two of the Hapsburg emperor Charles V and the emperor’s son, Philip II of Spain. Though the busts depict sitters of different rank—an emperor, a king, and a duke—Leoni presents them almost identically, as armored warriors in the cause of the Counter Reformation. For more than a century they have adorned the Guard Chamber at Windsor Castle, surrounded by actual weaponry and armor. Just as victorious Romans piled up the armor of their enemies as offerings to the gods, so George IV (who acquired the busts in 1825) turned these symbols of power into trophies of war.

Wednesday, January 31, 6:30 pm
“Raphael as Designer for the Decorative Arts

Speakers: Sir Timothy Clifford, former director of The National Galleries of Scotland
Ticket/entry details: Ticketed event, free for students with ID
Organized by: The Morgan Library and Drawing Institute
Location: The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Website: http://www.themorgan.org/public/program.asp?id=606
Additional information: 
Introduction to Raphael’s designs for metalwork, textiles, and frames.

 

February

Wednesday, February 13, 6:00 pm
“Piero at Home”

Speakers: Machtelt Israëls Researcher, History of Renaissance and Early Modern Art, University of Amsterdam
Ticket/entry details: Free, no reservation necessary.
Organized by: The Frick Collection
Location: The Music Room at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th St, New York, NY
Website: http://www.frick.org/calendar/index.htm
Additional information: 
During the early Renasisance, Piero della Francesca’s artistic talents were highly sought after by patrons across the Italian peninsula but nowhere more so than in his hometown of Borgo San Sepolcro. This lecture will explore how Piero gradually transformed the art of painting by applying his pioneering pictorial imagination to the challenge of three gothic polyptychs and by introducing Renaissance-format paintings into the domestic interior with his Virgin and Child Enthroned With Four Angels (featured in the exhibition) and Nativity of Christ (The National Gallery, London). The latter work will be discussed in the context of architectural and pictorial decoration designed by Piero for his family’s private palazzo.  This lecture is made possible by the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation

Thursday, February 14, 6:00 pm
"(Re)constructing Italian Altarpieces: The Case of the Toscanelli Polyptych"

Speakers: Machtelt Israëls Researcher, History of Renaissance and Early Modern Art, University of Amsterdam
Ticket/entry details: Free; no reservations necessary
Organized by: The New York Renaissance Consortium
Location: 612 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University

March

Wednesday, March 6, 6:00 pm
“Leonardo da Vinci: Singular and Plural”

Speakers: Luke Syson, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Curator in Charge, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ticket/entry details: Ticketed event
Organized by: The Metropolitan Museum
Location: Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Metropolitan Museum
Website: http://www.metmuseum.org/events/programs/lectures-and-panels/ticketed-talks/leonardo-da-vinci-1?eid=3998
Additional information: 
Leonardo worked on a surprisingly small number of works—the Mona Lisa among them—refining and altering them over years. This method created a production bottleneck that could only be dealt with through delegating, leaving us with the problem of how we distinguish a fully autograph product from a painting made in the workshop. This lecture by Luke Syson (organizer of the triumphant exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, at London's National Gallery) explores artistic production, collaboration, and delegation, and will track Leonardo's personal journey from a solitary artist to a collaborator working with pupils, assistants, and peers, and back.

Wednesday, March 13,  6:00 pm
“Leonardo da Vinci: Rethinking Leonardo in his Old Age
Speakers: Carmen Bambach, Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, Metropolitan Museum of Att
Ticket/entry details: Ticketed event
Organized by: The Metropolitan Museum
Location: Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Metropolitan Museum
Website: http://www.metmuseum.org/events/programs/lectures-and-panels/ticketed-talks/leonardo-da-vinci-2?eid=3999
Additional information: 
The late years of Leonardo da Vinci have often been minimized in comparison to his achievements in Florence and Milan. This may be because it's sometimes fashionable to consider an artist's production in old age past its prime or merely a replication of earlier, more successfully received work. In this talk, Carmen Bambach (who organized the Met's seminal 2003 exhibition Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman) examines Leonardo's later years and the riches of his interior life and his concrete, multifaceted production as an artist-thinker. What lies at front and center in the work of Leonardo's old age is the unfinished dimension of his thought and production.

Wednesday, March 20, 6:00 pm
“Three Geniuses and a Franciscan Friar”

Speakers: James R. Banker, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, North Carolina State University
Ticket/entry details: Free; no reservations necessary
Organized by: The Frick Collection
Location: The Music Room at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th St, New York, NY
Website: http://www.frick.org/calendar/index.htm
Additional information: 
More often celebrated as a painter, Piero della Francesca was also a pioneering mathematician. This lecture will discuss Piero’s achievements as a mathematician, focusing on his precocious mastery of the teachings of the Greek geometrician Archimedes. Shortly after his death, Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar, published two of Piero’s treatises under his own name and conveyed Piero’s knowledge of geometry to Leonardo da Vinci, who later became an expert in the subject. 

April




Monday, April 1, 10am - 12noon
Discussion about Piero della Francesca in America.

Speakers: Dr. Nathaniel Silver
Ticket/entry details: Space for this event is limited to fifteen individuals. Priority will be given to graduate students at the Institute of Fine Arts and Columbia University with relevant interests in Renaissance art. RSVP to Charles Howard (cnh238@nyu.edu) prior to March 20, 2013.
Organized by: Charles Howard
Location: Oval Room in the Frick Collection
Website: http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/piero 



Thursday, April 25, 6:30 p.m.
"Licit Money: Spatial Networks of Banks in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy"

Speaker: Lauren Jacobi, Visiting Professor; Dartmouth College Department of Art History
Ticket/entry details: Free; no reservations necessary
Organized by: New York University Department of Art History
Location: Silver Center, Room 30, 100 Washington Square East (entrance on Waverly Place)

Tuesday, April 30, 6:00 pm
"My pain is ever before you": The Flagellation of Christ in fifteenth-century Florence.

Speakers: Scott Nethersole, Lecturer, The Courtauld Institute of Art
Ticket/entry details: Free; no reservations necessary
Organized by: The New York Renaissance Consortium
Location: The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1 East 78th Street
Website: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/research/renaissance/events.htm

May

Wednesday, March 1, 6:00 pm
“Piero’s Landscapes”

Speakers: Scott Nethersole, Lecturer, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Ticket/entry details: Free; no reservations necessary
Organized by: The Frick Collection
Location: The Music Room at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th St, New York, NY
Website: http://www.frick.org/calendar/index.htm
Additional information: 
The landscapes in Piero’s paintings, particularly his Baptism of Christ (National Gallery, London), are often thought to recall the area around his hometown of Borgo San Sepolcro. In truth, they evoke the upper Tiber Valley without describing it precisely. But what did it mean to locate sacred scenes in a recognizable and local setting?  Did that landscape carry any connotations for the fifteenth-century residents of Borgo San Sepolcro that might be lost to us today?

Saturday, May 18, 2:00 pm
“From Borgo San Sepolcro to the East Coast”

Speakers: Nathaniel Silver, Guest Curator, The Frick Collection
Ticket/entry details: Free with museum admission; no reservations necessary
Organized by: The Frick Collection
Location: The Music Room at The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th St, New York, NY
Website: http://www.frick.org/calendar/index.htm
Additional information: 
During a career spanning nearly sixty years, Piero della Francesca worked in almost every major center across the Italian peninsula although nowhere did he accept more commissions than in Borgo San Sepolcro. Like his native city, Piero’s paintings are possessed of a character that is neither Florentine nor Sienese but entirely unique. On the closing weekend of the special exhibition, the show’s curator will discuss Piero’s career in Borgo and explore how some of his masterpieces created for that city reached American shores.