History of Art Associate Professor Lorenzo Pericolo joined members of the Royal Shakespeare Company this week at their rehearsal of a new play The Seven Acts of Mercy. The play tracks the creation of Caravaggio’s famous work of the same name which shows seven acts of kindness in a single scene, and which was painted after the artist had killed a man and fled from Rome. Dr Pericolo, author of two books on Caravaggio, answered questions about the artist's approach to painting, his life and reputation, and how he created The Seven Acts of Mercy. The Company included the play’s writer Anders Lustgarten, director Erica Whyman and Patrick O’Kane, who is playing Caravaggio. Find out more on the RSC news page.

The Seven Acts of Mercy opens in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon on 24 November.

There is a coach trip for students at the University of Warwick on 24 November.

Emeritus Professor Louise Campbell has worked with Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum to research the subject of the forthcoming exhibition, Concealment and Deception: The Art of the Camoufleurs of Leamington Spa 1939-45. The exhibition tells the story of the camouflage establishment based in Royal Leamington Spa during World War 2. The Civil Defence Camouflage Establishment was founded at the start of the war with Nazi Germany to develop camouflage for strategically important installations like factories, power stations and airfields. Later, in 1941, the CDCE was expanded to include a Naval Camouflage Section and renamed the Camouflage Directorate. The exhibition presents the work of the camouflage staff - often known as 'camoufleurs' - against the backdrop of life on the 'Home Front', and will display an important group of paintings, watercolours and drawings by artists such as Mary Adshead, Dorothy Annan, Stephen Bone, Louis Duffy, Evelyn Dunbar, Eric Hall, Cedric Kennedy, Edwin La Dell, Colin Moss and James Yunge-Bateman.

Concealment and Deception: The Art of the Camoufleurs of Leamington Spa 1939 - 1945

Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, 22 July – 16 October 2016

Members of the Department have worked with Compton Verney and the Hart Silversmith Trust to create a new exhibition: The Hart Silversmiths: A Living Tradition. The exhibition explores the work of silversmith George Henry Hart (1882-1973) and three generations of the Hart family, all of whom continue Arts and Crafts traditions. Much of the research for the exhibition was carried out by Dr. Sarah Walford and undergraduate student Pip Shergold. The exhibition is related to the research project Ashbee and After: Drawing in the Silversmiths’ Workshop, directed by Professor Michael Hatt. The exhibition closes 13th September 2015.

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.

Following a proposal by Professor Louise Campbell, the church of St Oswald, Tile Hill Coventry (designed by Basil Spence), which echoes in miniature and in modern materials the design of Coventry Cathedral, was added on 2 October to English Heritage's Register of Listed Buildings

Find out more about our AHRC project: The life and work of Sir Basil Spence 1907-76: architecture, tradition and modernity

See more images on the project page for this building.

The Wall Street Journal has just published a review of Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901, an exhibition co-curated by Michael Hatt of the History of Art department.

See earlier news item

Department of History of Art former PhD student Nora Gietz will deliver a special legacy lecture in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo and the 50th anniversary of St.John's International School, Waterloo. She will speak about her doctoral thesis: The Effects of Napoleonic Rule on Venice's Artistic Patrimony.

Nora completed her PhD in summer 2013 and was examined in September 2013.

Thursday October 2 at 19:30, reception from 18:30, Theater of the Performing Arts Center, St. John's International School, Waterloo, Belgium.

Free admission, donations to the scholarship fund gratefully accepted.

A major exhibition co-curated by Michael Hatt of the Department of History of Art opened in the United States last week.

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, where the show will travel in the spring. Find out more.

Three Warwick graduates have been back to work on the Pontigny project with Dr Jenny Alexander of the History of Art department and Prof. Terryl Kinder of Pontigny. Rosie Harris Adamson and Lucy Henderson were awarded scholarships for the URSS Pontigny Project in 2011 and they were joined by Agatha Gomolka, a MA student from the department, who is now working on her PhD. Another Pontigny Project team member, Roo Alexander-Jones, the team's film maker, who graduated from Oxford Brookes university last summer, completed the team.

The team was trying out some new equipment derived from the optics used by bird-watchers and for the first time it was possible to find and record the marks made by the stonemasons who built the vaults high up in the building. The results are now being processed, but it is already clear that the team's work has provided vital new evidence about the relationship between the high vaults and the main stucture of the building, and this will resolve a long-standing question about Cistercian builders and their place in early-Gothic architecture.

In his introduction to the Biennale, the artistic director Rolando Bellini quotes from Dr Karen Lang's book Chaos and the Cosmos: on the Image in Aesthetics and Art History: "Of note, in her afterword, Toward an Aesthetic Way of Knowing, Lang affirms that 'the aesthetic object remains a stubbornly ethical presence in the age of capitalism'."

Karen Lang delivers her conference paper: Ethics and the Void in the Art of Anish Kapoor.

Conference: Neo-Humanism: Art, Ethics, and Aesthetics at the Dawn of the new Millennium - In Memory of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. Date: 3 December 2013. Location: Salone dei Cinquecento, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.