Fashioning Victoria: curating the royal image for dynasty, nation and empire is a collaboration between Historic Royal Palaces and University of Warwick, funded by an AHRC Research Networking Grant. Project partners include the Royal Collections Trust, Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, the Bodleian Library, and TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities).

The workshop taking place this afternoon in Coventry will feature new research and presentations on the theme of air, environment, and embodied and cultural experiences of breath by Dr Amanda Sciampacone, George Saxon (Coventry University), Jane Macnaughton and Jayne Wilton (Life of Breath project: Durham-Wellcome Institute).

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.

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.

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.

Nicola Viviani has published the book Mail Art Stories: the mail artist tells his own story, in collaboration with the mail artist Lancilotto Bellini. The book records a project conceived by Bellini in the mid-1990s, which collected work from mail artists around the world. This is the first time the project and the works it generated have been published.

Nicola will be joining the department as a PhD student in 2017-18, and will be writing his thesis on collector, patron, publisher and collaborator Francesco Conz, one of the most influential figures in the late-twentieth century neo-avant-garde art world.

We are very pleased to announce Olga Smith's arrival in September as a WIRL-COFUND Research (Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Leadership Programme) Fellow. For this prestigious two-year award Olga will develop her project on the politics and aesthetics of photographic representations of landscape in Europe in the contemporary period.

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.