Contemporary artist sends signed exhibition catalogues to students who took part in a seminar with him in Venice last year.

On 7 March, students had the opportunity to try out ancient painting techniques at two specialist workshops led by Jevon Thistlewood, paintings conservator at the Ashmolean Museum. The sessions were organised by the Classics department through IATL, with help from History of Art. Students painted their own mummy portraits using tempera on gesso and encaustic work with cold and hot wax.

First year Art History student, Matthew White, said “It did feel very authentic and the use of wax on painting was a very new idea and good fun…I was especially interested in mixing wax with pigment. This was completely novel to me.”

The History of Art Department recently joined other institutions at the annual ARTiculation Finals event at Clare College, Cambridge. ARTiculation is a public speaking competition for 16-19 year olds, offering a chance for pupils from state and independent schools all around the country to engage with art and architecture in a way which encourages looking, thinking and speaking. Nearly 200 people attended the competition.

Our department had a stall at the University Fair which received many interested visitors, and Dr Sarah Walford presented a seven-minute taster lecture on the Sèvres ‘Copenhagen Vase’, from the Waddesdon collection.

Sarah Walford - “It was a wonderful opportunity to take an object that our first-year students have studied and to show the many ways in which it can be interpreted. It’s important to show that art history can encompass everything from politics to manufacturing process and science to social history.”

Dr Sarah Walford has been speaking to Trish Adudu on the BBC Coventry and Warwickshire radio Breakfast Show about the campaign to raise funds for the repair of the bell tower of St Oswald’s Church, Tile Hill. The church is one of a group of three parish churches in Coventry designed by the architect Basil Spence. Sarah was asked about Spence and his architecture, and why the tower is important. It was noted that many Coventrians are unaware that these churches in the Coventry suburbs (also Wood End and Willenhall) were designed by the same architect as the Cathedral, and that the campaign is raising awareness of their significance. The three churches have all been listed for their architectural quality and technical innovation.

You can find out more about The Life and Work of Sir Basil Spence on our project pages.

(Image credit: cc-by-sa/2.0 © Robin Stott geograph.org.uk/p/5345926)

A few days ago, third-year PhD student Benedetta Pacini visited the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice where Vittore Carpaccio’s Legend of Saint Ursula cycle, a group of nine large-scale canvases, is being restored. In connection with her research, she interviewed chief restorer Egidio Arlango (seen with Benedetta in the photograph), who is working alongside CBC (Conservazione Beni Culturali) on the project. The work, scheduled for completion by 2019, is being carried out with the support of Save Venice Inc.

Benedetta’s doctoral thesis is entitled Navigating the Canals. Making and Moving Venetian Renaissance Paintings, and is a joint research project between the University of Warwick and the National Gallery in London. Her research focuses on the making and transportation of large-scale paintings in sixteenth-century Venice, with particular attention to those in the National Gallery.

History of Art PhD research student Delia Moldovan has presented a paper at this year's Newbery Graduate Student Conference entitled The Calendar of a Printed Book of Hours and Its Impact on Sixteenth-Century Italian Illumination. In the paper, the iconographic impact of incunabula on the production of illuminated Italian calendars is considered using the 'Officium beate Marie virginis: ad usum Romane ecclesie' as a case study. The Officum was printed in Lyon in four editions between 1499 and 1501 by Spanish and Piedmont printers, and edited by Bonino de Boninis. It is demonstrated that the woodcuts were used as iconographic models for two luxury manuscripts created in Ferrarese and Florentine, respectively.

Her REPORT can be viewed online.

Students studying Spanish Painting and course leader Professor Lorenzo Pericolo recently visited Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, for a dedicated tour of the collection. Curator Bernadette Petti guided the group through the Spanish paintings, including access to the store where more works are housed. She also explained the newly established Auckland Project (Auckland Bishop) and its importance for the study of Spanish painting and culture.

Professor Michael Hatt has chaired a session with Martina Droth (Yale Center for British Art) at the CAA conference in Los Angeles: The Image of the American Indian in Nineteenth-Century Britain: New Critical Perspectives.

This interdisciplinary session seeks to explore the various ways in which native peoples from the United States and Canada, and the artifacts of their cultures, were being represented, portrayed, studied, and collected in Britain in the long nineteenth century.

An article written by Fabio Franz has been published in the latest issue of Brill's journal Experiment.

An Inspirational Milieu: St. Petersburg Cosmopolitan Collections of Old Masters focuses on the provenance, conservation history, and critical fortuna of some selected Western European paintings that were placed in Saint Petersburg between 1850 and 1917. It includes: a comparison between the visits to Russia made by the German expert Gustav Friedrich Waagen and the Italian connoisseur Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle; an investigation of Cavalcaselle’s alleged meeting with the Russian expert Fedor Antonovich Bruni regarding the paintings Saint Sebastian Barbarigo by Titian, Apollo and Marsyas Litta by Bronzino, and Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John, now attributed to Pontormo; and an exploration of the extent to which Russian galleries and private collections were accessible to Western scholars.

Experiment, Volume 23, Issue 1, pages 81 – 92

History of Art Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow Amanda Sciampacone will be presenting a paper entitled 'The Aesthetics of the Diagram in Victorian Medical Climatology' in a session on 'Art on the Nature of Data about Nature' at the College Art Association annual conference in Los Angeles on 23 February 2018.

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.

Don't miss Canaletto & the Art of Venice, which opened the major ITV series Great Art.