The second Maius Masterclass will take place on 10 July 2020, 4–5pm on Zoom. We will welcome ProfessorRocío Sánchez Ameijeiras (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela), who will explore the theme of visual genres as one of the recurring threads of her academic career.
Please click here tojoin (you will be asked to register and download Zoom, so we recommend you sign up in advance). You can use your PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone or Android device.
The series is kindly supported by a Hispanex Grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and SPAIN Arts & Culture/Embassy of Spain in London.
In case you missed it, the BSR has shared a recording of last week’s talk by Piers Baker-Bates and James W. Nelson Novoa, The Iberian and the Other in early modern Rome.
Click here to register, places are limited (NB 17.00 UK time)
From the British School at Rome:
We are delighted to launch this series of #BSROnlineLectures for all our friends and followers and in the hope of making new ones. Thanks go to all of those who have agreed to contribute to this first series and to colleagues at the BSR who have pulled the series together with such skill and speed. Although we cannot gather here in Rome, we take consolation in coming together online. – Stephen Milner, Director
For different communities, at different times and for different reasons, Rome has always formed an important locus; this discussion will focus on one particular such early modern group. As the sixteenth-century progressed into the seventeenth, many individual Spanish and Portuguese had made their way to Rome, not only because of its geo-political significance, but also because for a large minority of them it offered a freedom of action that was unobtainable in their own countries. These were the Conversos, Iberians of Jewish descent, who were being gradually and effectively excluded from playing a role in church and state in Spain and Portugal, two countries that were briefly united from 1580. Drawing on our research in Rome, undertaken as historian and art historian respectively, we shall discuss the kind of lives these men (and occasionally women) were able to make for themselves in Rome, what roles they played there, and their importance, out of scale to their number, as patrons of the visual arts both at home and abroad, ranging from El Greco to Velazquez.
Piers Baker-Bates is currently a Visiting Research Associate at The Open University, United Kingdom, having previously been a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the same institution. He is also chair of ARTES, the Iberian & Latin American Visual Culture Group. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in March 2006 and has since held fellowships at a number of institutions, including the British School at Rome and the Dutch Institute in Florence and was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at CASVA in Autumn 2019. This was for his new project: ‘In the Spanish Fashion: Italian Material Culture and Spanish Devotional Practice in the Sixteenth Century’. His book on Sebastiano del Piombo, Sebastiano del Piombo and the World of Spanish Rome was published in September 2016, while articles on Sebastiano have appeared in both edited collections and in journals. He has also co-authored two edited volumes, The Spanish Presence in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Images of Iberia, with Dr Miles Pattenden, which was published by Ashgate, supported by the CEEH, in January 2015 and “Un nuovo modo di colorire in pietra”: Paintings on Stone and Material Innovation, with Dr Elena Calvillo, which was published by Brill in March 2018. More recently he has contributed an essay and entries to the catalogue of the National Gallery, London, exhibition, Sebastiano del Piombo and Michelangelo, which ran from March to June 2017 and the Uffizi, Florence, exhibition, Spagna e Italia in Dialogo nell’Europa dell Cinquecento, which ran from February to May 2018.
James W. Nelson Novoa is Associate Professor in the department of Modern Languages and Literatures and Medieval and Renaissance studies at the University of Ottawa (Canada). He received his doctorate in Spanish philology from the University of Valencia in Spain in 2003 under the direction of Professor Julio Alonso Asenjo, with a European thesis co-directed by Professor Michele Luzzati of the University of Pisa. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the Foundation for Science and Technology of Portugal (2006–10) and (2011–14). Between 2014 and 2015 he was a researcher in the research project funded by the European Research Council and led by Professor Yosef Kaplan at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: a transitional diaspora: cultural and religious changes in the Sephardic western communities during the period Modern, Faculty of Humanities, Hebrew University. He is the author of the book Being the Nação in the Eternal City: Portuguese New Christian Lives in Sixteenth Century Rome, Peterborough: Baywolf Press, 2014, of more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and 25 book chapters. Among his areas of academic interest are Italo-Iberian cultural relations in the modern period and the New Christian diaspora in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Gallery is scheduled to reopen on July 20th, but until then you can visit virtually. The online version features a 360 degree image of the exhibition with the possibility to zoom in on the paintings and read the accompanying labels and text panels.
The museum’s director, conservators, curators, archivists, and other experts present 5-10 minute talks focused on key aspects of the permanent collection, including individual works and entire areas, such as the rare books from the museum’s library (in Spanish).
The director, researchers, and the heads of various departments have recorded short talks from inside the museum during the lockdown to share details about the history and conservation of various works in the collection (in Portuguese).
This site features virtual museum visits from around the world, which you can navigate with a map or alphabetically,such as the Muesu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona or the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. It is also worth exploring the other features of the site, including high definition images, narrated talks about individual works, virtual tours of famous sites, and much more.
What is conveyed by the armour in Bermejo’s Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil?
In this talk, Tobias Capwell reveals how Renaissance artists used the rich imagery of arms and armour to communicate messages about power and faith.
Tobias Capwell is Curator of Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection in London, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and an internationally acknowledged expert on Medieval and Renaissance weapons.
Four Spanish women artists based in the UK discuss their experiences and achievements in the Performing and Visual Arts: Tamara Rojo, Artistic Director of the English National Ballet; Angela de la Cruz, visual artist; Paula Paz, associate director of the Cervantes Theatre; and Isabel del Rio, poet and writer. The discussion will focus on how their Spanish background informs their work, on the unique artistic perspectives of biculturalism and bilingualism, and on their contribution to British Art and London’s cultural scene.
Event hosted by Idil Sukan, artist and photographer.
Tamara Rojo was appointed Artistic Director of English National Ballet in 2012. She combines this role with her dancing career, performing as Lead Principal with the Company. In January 2016 Tamara Rojo became D.A. Magna Cum Laude, presenting her thesis ‘Psychological Profile of the Elite Dancer – Vocational Characteristics of the Professional Dancer’ at Rey Juan Carlos University, and was awarded a CBE for her services to ballet in the Queen’s 2016 New Year’s Honours.
Angela de la Cruz studied Philosophy at the University of Santiago de Compostela. In the late 80s she moved to London where she studied at Chelsea College of Art and later at Goldsmiths College and Slade School of Art. She has exhibited in galleries all over the world, including the show entitled “After”, her first solo exhibition in the UK at Camden Arts Centre in April 2010. In May 2010 she was nominated for the Turner Prize.
Paula Paz is co-founder and Associate Director of the Cervantes Theatre and the Spanish Theatre Company. She is a theatre director and former professional ballet dancer and holds an MA with distinction in theatre directing from Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. She has directed The Little Pony, The Swallow, Darwin’s Tortoise, Knives in Hens, Eigengrau, History of a Staircase and Hay que deshacer la Casa.
Organized by Instituto Cervantes in collaboration with Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS) at King’s College London, The Spanish Women Network and the British Spanish Society.
For more information, click here. Free admission, RSVP.
