Professor Paul Smith has been awarded a summer fellowship at the Clark Institute in Williamstown to pursue research into pictorial syntax, or how we construct the immaterial, virtual image in a picture from the material marks on its surface.

Congratulations to Philip Zidarov, an MA student in the department, who has won a scholarship from the Cini Foundation in Venice to pursue research at the Vittore Branca International Center for Studies of Italian Culture. Philip’s project, Visual Documents of Two Volcanic Eruptions: The Journeys of Images, examines the use and re-use of images of Etna and Vesuvius by artists, engravers, and printers through the 17th and 18th centuries.

English Heritage has just added the churches of St John Willenhall and St Chad Wood End to its listed buildings register. With the recent listing of St Oswald Tile Hill (added to list in October 2014) this means that all of Basil Spence’s churches in Coventry are now protected.

They were nominated by Louise Campbell, supported by the Twentieth Century Society.
In assessing them, English Heritage’s inspector drew heavily on research done in 2004-8 by the Basil Spence project team based at Warwick http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/arthistory/research/projects/basil_spence 

The Minister’s decision about whether to list Spence’s Hyde Park Cavalry Barracks in London is now pending – see
http://www.c20society.org.uk/news/concern-over-the-fate-of-hyde-park-barracks/

The major international exhibition co-curated by Michael Hatt of the Department of History of Art has travelled from the United States to London, and opens today at Tate Britain.

Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901 has been organised by the Yale Center for British Art, in partnership with Tate Britain. See earlier news item.

We were saddened to hear of the death of former colleague Dr Richard Morris, Research Associate and Reader in History of Art from 1974 until 2001.

Richard was an architectural historian and buildings archaeologist who played a significant role in the establishment of the department and its international reputation for the architectural history of England during the middle ages and the early modern period. He developed the Warwick Mouldings Archive, a paper archive of full-size moulding profiles from numerous standing structures and some archaeological collections, mainly in England and Wales. His recent publications covered such sites as Chepstow Castle, Coventry St Mary’s Cathedral Priory, Eynsham Abbey, Kenilworth Castle, Sherborne Abbey, Stoneleigh Abbey, Tewkesbury Abbey and Tintern Abbey.

Memories and Tributes

The History of Art department’s status as one of the country’s leading departments has been confirmed by the results of the Research Excellence Framework.

The REF assesses the quality of each department’s research, as well as the public impact of that research, and the environment in which it is undertaken.

The department was 2nd for publications awarded the highest rating of 4* or ‘world-leading’, with 46% of our publications rated as world-leading.

For 4* ratings across all aspects of the REF, we were the 4th placed History of Art department.
 
According to the Research Fortnight Quality Index, Warwick was ranked 6th overall for History of Art.

History of Art PhD student, Stefano Colombo, has been awarded a Royal Historical Society conference travel grant. The grant will allow him to deliver a presentation at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Berlin, 26-28 March 2015. The title of the presentation is “The Commemorative Monument of the Fini Family in San Moisè: Strategies of Self-Promotion and Social Affirmation in Seventeenth-Century Venice".

Members of the Department of History of Art have assisted with captions for an exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale, Venice.

The Henry Moore Institute Library in Leeds is currently showing the display Henry Hugh Armstead's Royal Academy: A Sculptor's Career in Late Victorian Britain which has been curated by Desiree de Chair, PhD candidate in the History of Art department. The display is on until 14 December 2014.

Dr Karen Lang took part in a live discussion on the BBC Radio 3 programme Free Thinking on 9th October.

'Tim Marlow, Karen Lang, and Daniel Johnson discuss reading history through the paintings of Kiefer and Polke ahead of next month's 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.'

Hear the Podcast on the BBC Radio Three web site.

Kayoko Ichikawa formed part of a group at the Digital Humanities Fall School at Ca’ Foscari, our partner university in Venice.