Tomorrow evening, Karen Lang (Reader in History of Art) and Clare Woods will be discussing the artist’s new series of paintings in a special event at the Mead Gallery. A panel of University of Warwick academics including Clément Dessy, Johannes Roessler and Jonathan Skinner will comment on Woods’ work and the discussion will then open up to involve the audience.

Clare Woods’ work is held in many major international collections including those of the University of Warwick, Arts Council England, the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, USA.

The event is organised by the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts.

On Wednesday 20th September 2017 Art History PhD student and lutenist Adam Busiakiewicz presented a public talk on Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors.

The talk focused in on the symbolism and significance of the lute featured within Holbein's enigmatic double portrait. Aside from the broken string which emphasised the growing political discord due to the protestant reformation, Holbein's brilliantly detailed depiction of the instrument provides a thrilling insight into the status of the lute at the court of Henry VIII. The talk was researched in association with London luthiers Sandi Harris and Stephen Barber, who loaned a closely corresponding instrument for the presentation.

Several pieces of contemporary sixteenth century music were performed in front of the painting, including a printed Lutheran hymn which appears within the painting itself.

Dr Alice Eden presented a paper entitled ‘Frederick Cayley Robinson: Paintings of Life, Death and Still Life’ at this year's conference organised by the British Association of Modernist Studies (BAMS). The conference on the theme of Modernist Life was held at the University of Birmingham earlier this month.

History of Art Department Research Fellow Amanda Sciampacone will be presenting a paper entitled 'Climatology, Medicine, and Scientific Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Britain' on 6 July 2017 at the Mediating Climate Change conference at the University of Leeds.

Emeritus Professor Louise Campbell will be giving a paper on Sussex University on 15 June at the Oxford Brookes conference 'Architecture Citizenship Space: British Architecture from the 1920s to the 1970s'. The paper is entiltled "'A background sympathetic to young and energetic minds': forming modern citizens at the University of Sussex".

On May 20th, Amanda Sciampacone will be presenting a paper on '"Injurious Impregnations of the Air": Medical Climatology in the Victorian Visual Imagination' at the NAVSA/AVSA conference to be held at Villa La Pietra in Florence.

Professionalization Workshop. 15th to 17th and 21st May.

On the 26th of April 2017, Art History PhD student and lutenist Adam Busiakiewicz presented a public talk on Ter Brugghen's Lute Player at the National Gallery in London.

The lute was used by painters to express various ideas in their works, apart from the obvious allusions to harmony and discord. The musical associations with Orpheus, the melter-of-hearts, would not have been lost on the contemporary audience of this painting. Various symbolic links to notions of youth, flippancy and the transience of life and worldly pleasures are also all associated with the mythology of the instrument and its music. Paintings such as Ter Brugghen’s Lutenist allow us to open up a world of understanding how music was appreciated and consumed in the past.

The talk was accompanied by several live performances of lute music relevant to the period and themes of the painting.

Amanda Sciampacone will be presenting a paper on '"Animalized Atmospheres": Climatology and Disease in Victorian Britain' tomorrow at the Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar (MIVSS) on Victorians and the Environment to be held at Birmingham City University. The MIVSS is a group for scholars working on any aspect of nineteenth-century culture in the Midlands. MIVSS meets twice a year to have a day of themed discussion and to share research.

Amanda will be presenting a paper entitled "Dirty Father Thames" and the Microscopic Grotesque: Cholera and Water after John Snow at the Northern Nineteenth-Century Network's Water Conference at Leeds Trinity University next month.

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow Amanda Sciampacone was invited to speak about applying for the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in a workshop on Research Grants held at the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. The event took place on March 1st.

History of Art PhD student Carlo Avilio recently delivered his paper Portents of Nature: Jusepe de Ribera and the Bearded Woman at the conference Laboratorium Neapel. Plurale Stilbildung, Künstlerkonkurrenz und Wirkungsästhetik in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei. The conference was held at Museum Wiesbaden to coincide with the major exhibition Caravaggio’s Heirs. Baroque in Naples.

The photograph shows Carlo with Elisabeth Oy-Marra, professor in history of art at Mainz University, co-organizer of the exhibition and conference.

Going round in circles: a problem for colour theory.

Since the early eighteenth century, painters have used the colour wheel, and related diagrams, to predict how colours will mix, to organise them in graduated sequences and contrasting pairs, and to arrange them in harmonious combinations. Artists, along with scientists and philosophers, have also used colour diagrams to set out the relations possible between colours, or the full variety colour can assume. But, although such diagrams are powerful heuristic and logical tools, they embody some significant misconceptions, and create a good deal of confusion, about colour. Drawing on arguments put forward by the philosopher, Wittgenstein, this paper will examine how they fudge or misrepresent the phenomenology, categorisation, and ‘space’ of colour – and the consequences of their doing so for art.

Open to all, free admission.

Thursday 23rd February 2017

5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Research Forum Seminar Room, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN