On the 7^th November, a Faculty of Arts Year 9 taster-day brought together 40 students from schools in Coventry and Birmingham, to explore some of the themes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The aim of the day was to introduce students to the breadth of perspectives offered by arts subjects and to hopefully inspire them to consider the arts in their future studies.

Professor Lorenzo Pericolo and Dr Carlo Avilio are taking part in an international study day at the Dulwich Picture Gallery - Ribera’s Art of Violence: New Intersections and Interventions. The event relates to the exhibition Ribera: Art of Violence (26 September 2018 – 27 January 2019), and comprises academic and public sessions.

Applications are invited for a full-time PhD (via MPhil route) studentship on the following topic: College, City and Beyond: the History and Contribution of Coventry School of Art & Design from 1843 onwards.

FIND OUT MORE about this studentship.

You can watch Professor Paul Smith in an event which will be streamed live from Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery. He will join Darryl Georgiou of Coventry University to discuss works in the current exhibition Cézanne: Montagne Sainte-Victoire showing the well-loved and significant painting by Cézanne lent by the Courtauld Gallery in London, and paintings from the Coventry collection by artists such as Paul Nash, David Bomberg, LS Lowry and Prunella Clough.

History of Art Teaching Fellow Dr Melanie Zefferino has been appointed a juror for the Osten Biennial of Drawing, an international event based in Skopje, Macedonia. An article including interviews with all the jurors has just been published on the website itsliquid. The other two members of the panel are Manos Stefanidis (former Curator of the National Gallery of Greece, commissioner for the Greek Pavilion at the 1990 Venice Biennale, and Professor of art history at Athens University), and Sonja Abadzieva (director of the Contemporary Art Museum of Skopje, 1965-2005, and founder of the The Large Glass contemporary art magazine).

The Osten Biennial of Drawing is an exhibition of drawings, prints, photos, and other techniques applied on paper open to artists from around the world. This year the Osten Biennial of Drawing is giving a special award in memoriam to Henry Moore.

Leverhulme Post Doctoral Fellow, Josefine Baark, has produced a documentary film, entitled ‘The Mystery of the Chinese Mechanism’ (Det Kinesiske Urværks Hemmeligheder) in collaboration with Christian Laursen Film.

The first Frances Clarke Annual Lecture will take place at the Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava in Venice on 16th November.

Frederick Ilchman, co-curator of this year's anniversary exhibitions at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, will talk about Tintoretto's artistic achievement and give an insider's view of the organization of the exhibitions.

Frederick Ilchman was part of the curatorial team for the Museo del Prado's Tintoretto exhibition in 2007 and lead curator for "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Musée du Louvre in 2009. He also serves as Chairman of Save Venice Inc., the American counterpart to Venice in Peril.

The Frances Clarke Annual Lecture
"Exhibiting Tintoretto at 500"
Frederick Ilchman, Chair, Art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Warwick in Venice & History of Art Department
Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava, Venice.

16th November at 6 p.m.

PhD research student Delia Moldovan has published an article entitled ‘Astrology and Agriculture in the Calendar of the Offiziolo of Charles VIII (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, inv. 2502/4)’, in the periodical Rivista di storia della miniatura (22 2018). The article is an interdisciplinary approach to the miniatures of the calendar opening the Officium parvum Beatae Mariae Virginis per annum, held in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. The study sheds new light on the zodiac signs and the occupations of the months depicted in the calendar, particularly investigating two key features characterising the Milanese court of the late fifteenth century: the interest in astrology and the importance given to agriculture.

An article written by History of Art research student Fabio Franz has been published in the Ca' Foscari University of Venice journal MDCCC 1800.

Disvelando pale, effigi e panneggi. Le ricognizioni danesi di Crowe e Cavalcaselle presents new research on a number of works housed in Danish collections, including celebrated portraits assigned to Titian and Parmigianino and altarpieces by Ortolano and Filippino Lippi. A comparison of the drapery and landscape painting in works by Mantegna, Leonardo, Giovanni Bellini and Jan van Eyck may to be of particular interest to those visiting Mantegna and Bellini, the exhibition currently on show at the National Gallery, London.

Dr Rosie Dias’s book, co-edited with Dr Kate Smith (University of Birmingham), will be published by Bloomsbury Academic this week. British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1770-1940 focuses on the ways in which British women, through engagements with material culture, sketching, collecting, curating, writing and display, contributed to constructions of empire in the modern period.

An essay written by Fabio Franz has been published in the proceedings of the prestigious conference on Andrea Schiavone which took place in 2016 at the Giorgio Cini Foundation and at the Marciana National Library (Venice).

In Schiavone nelle carte pietroburghesi di Cavalcaselle Franz argues that scholarship has never paid enough attention to Cavalcaselle's critical approach to Schiavone's work, and that archival sources indicate that even if he never published any article or book chapter on Schiavone, Cavalcaselle could have developed a broad and nuanced connoisseurship of Schiavone's oeuvre. During his stay in Saint Petersburg (1865), for example, Cavalcaselle drew some noteworthy sketches and took some important notes about the technique, the conservation, the attribution and the provenance of some specific paintings placed in Russia that were then assigned - by him or other contemporary experts - to Schiavone. These materials, now kept in the Marciana National Library (Venice), enhance the comprehension of the ways in which Cavalcaselle, as well as his editorial partner, the British connoisseur Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896), studied and evaluated Schiavone's drawing, painting and etching skills.

The paper aims to shed more light on the availability to 19th-century scholars of the Barbarigo Saint Sebastian by Titian (State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg). Moreover, this essay’s purpose is to provide some unknown elements on the collecting and critical fortuna of some cassoni dipinti and other specific paintings on panel or canvas that were once assigned to Meldola in Russia and in Western Europe.

This work will help scholars to improve the understading on how Cavalcaselle's and Crowe's method challenged some other major 19th-century European experts of Old Masters, such as Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1794-1868) or Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891), in relation to Schiavone’s style and technique.

Warwick University has joined the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership which will offer 100s of studentships for subjects in the Arts and Humanities, including support for engagement with cultural, creative & heritage organisations. See the University of Warwick news item.