(Further talks planned for January-March 2026 will be announced in the next newsletter).

On 4 November at 6pm GMT, Julia Vázquez, Andrew M. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Curator at Philadelphia Museum of Art, will speak about her book Velázquez, Painter & Curator, published by Brill in December 2024.

On 11 November at 6pm GMT, Andrea-Bianka Znorovsky, “Transferring Saint Marina the Monk to the Iberian Peninsula: Illuminations, Statuses, and Paintings”. 

2 December, 6:00 pm, GMT, Jamie Forde (University of Edinburgh). Details to be confirmed.

On 9 December at 6pm GMT Casilda Ybarra Satrústegui, Curator at Fundación MAPFRE, will give a talk (in Spanish) about the Swedish artist “Anders Zorn and Spain“. Her talk relates to the exhibition Anders Zorn, currently showing at the Kunsthalle Hamburg (until 25 January) and then at the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid from 19 February to 17 May 2026. For details, please see here: https://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/en/anders-zorn-en  .

On 27 January at 6pm GMT Graham Barrett, Durham University, will speak about “Imagining the Visigoths in Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Art”.

On 10 February at 6pm GMT Jessica Barker, The Courtauld Institute, will speak about “Anachronic Empire: The Afterlives of the Padrões of Diego Cão”.
Members will receive the Zoom links to these events via email.

On 10 March 2026, Natalia Sassu Suarez Ferri (St. Andrews University), “Mapuche Silverware and Decolonial Performance in Neyen Pailamilla’s My Body is a Museum“.

This lecture examines Mi cuerpo es un museo (2019) by queer Mapuche artist Neyen Pailamilla (formerly Paula Baeza Pailamilla, b. 1988), a performance that reimagines museum displays of Mapuche silverware through embodied intervention. Focusing on the specific objects incorporated into the work, I explore their spiritual and historical meanings, their role in challenging ongoing colonial structures, and how the performance asserts indigenous agency within spaces traditionally governed by colonial narratives. Speaker: Natalia Sassu Suarez Ferri is a Lecturer and Director of Teaching in the School of Art History, University of St Andrews. Her academic research focuses on Latin American modern and contemporary art and particularly on transcontinental links between Latin America and Europe. 

The 2025-2026 ARTES/Zurbarán Centre online seminar programme (hosted on Zoom), commencing on 29 October at 6pm BST with a talk by Estrella de Diego Otero from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid on the Spanish surrealism artist Maruja Mallo, entitled “Why are Women Painters so often Surrealists? The Case of Maruja Mallo”. 

On 14 October at 5.15 pm BST, ARTES members are invited to attend the online lecture by Verónica Uribe Hanabergh (Universidad de Los Andes) on “Restitution, Repatriation and Return in Latin America. Understanding Multiple Perspectives through National Case Studies”. The lecture, which is sponsored by the Getty-funded journal Art in Translation, is part of the Edinburgh College of Art Research Seminars in History of Art. It will be chaired by Claudia Hopkins. 
To register and receive a link, please visit the eventbrite site: 
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/history-of-art-research-seminar-series-dr-veronica-uribe-hanabergh-tickets-1464093827049?aff=oddtdtcreator

Further talks in February and March 2026 will be confirmed in due course.

 

Past Programme

Artist Susan Wilson in Conversation with Athena Art Foundation, on 15 May from 6pm to 7pm, UK time.

Artist Susan Wilson, also Senior Member of Faculty at The Royal Drawing School and member of the ARTES committee, will be in conversation about her work with the director of Athena Art Foundation, Nicola Jennings, on 15 May from 6pm to 7pm.

To find out more about this event and to register, please see: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/artist-susan-wilson-in-conversation-with-athena-art-foundation-tickets-1350044141369?aff=erelexpmlt

 

Piers Baker-Bates & Kate Lowe Q & A: ‘Provenance and Possession Acquisitions from the Portuguese Empire in Renaissance Italy’ – 6pm 19th March 2025

Piers Baker-Bates in conversation with Kate Lowe on her recent book: Provenance and Possession Acquisitions from the Portuguese Empire in Renaissance Italy. It will take place on Zoom on Wednesday 19th March at 6pm UK time. A discount code for the book will be provided for attendees of the lecture at the end of March. Please see details of the book and refer to the access link below:

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of ‘goods’ from Portuguese trading voyages—fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that this imperial ‘opening up’ of the world transformed the way Europeans understood the global.

In this book, K. J. P. Lowe challenges such an assumption, showing that Italians of this era cared more about the possession than the provenance of their newly acquired global goods. With three detailed case studies involving Florence and Rome, and drawing on unpublished archival material, Lowe documents the myriad occasions on which global knowledge became dissociated from overseas objects, animals, and people. Fundamental aspects of these imperial imports, including place of origin and provenance, she shows, failed to survive the voyage and make landfall in Europe. Lowe suggests that there were compelling reasons for not knowing or caring about provenance, and concludes that geographical knowledge, like all knowledge, was often restricted and not valued.

Professor Kate Lowe
Kate Lowe is Professor of Renaissance History and Culture, and Co-director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (CREMS) at Queen Mary University of London. She is also Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London. She has held research fellowships at I Tatti, Harvard University’s Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies, the National Humanities Centre in the US and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Kateco-convened the seminar on medieval and early modern Italian history at the Institute of Historical Research in London from 1995-2020, and was the academic editor of the history monograph series I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History, published by Harvard University Press, between 2012 and 2020.

José María Velasco: A View of Mexico Tuesday 11th March 6pm

Our next seminar in collaboration with Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art will be delivered by Daniel Sobrino Ralston, the CEEH Curator of Spanish Paintings at the National Gallery and chaired by Piers Baker-Bates. Daniel will give a lecture on the exhibition ‘José María Velasco: A View of Mexico’ on Tuesday 11th March at 6pm via Zoom. 

Abstract:
José María Velasco (1840–1912) emerged as Mexico’s leading landscape painter during the late nineteenth century as his country underwent sweeping social and industrial change. He was renowned for his monumental depictions of the area surrounding Mexico City, a high-altitude basin ringed by volcanoes called the Valley of Mexico.
His paintings, whether large or small in scale, are intricate visual documents that negotiate the complex interactions between nature, industry and history that shaped modern Mexico. Velasco exhibited in Europe and the United States during his lifetime, but his renown has since faded beyond Mexico’s borders.
José María Velasco: A View of Mexico – which will travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Art in fall 2025 – is the first comprehensive exploration of Velasco’s work in the United Kingdom. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue reconsider Velasco’s achievements, seeking to understand him not just as Mexico’s greatest nineteenth-century painter, but as an innovative modern artist whose scrupulous scientific approach presaged contemporary ecological concerns.

Bio:
Dr Daniel Sobrino Ralston is the CEEH Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings at the National Gallery and, with Dexter Dalwood, the co-curator of José María Velasco: A View of Mexico. He has published and lectured widely on Spanish art from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, contributing to a recent exhibition at the Gallerie d’Italia in Naples, Velázquez. Un segno grandioso (2024), and several at the National Gallery, including After Impressionism: Inventing

Q&A on Ribera: Ténèbres et lumière 25th February 6pm

Piers Baker-Bates and Edward Payne (Aarhus University, Denmark) will engage in conversation about the recent exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris, Ribera: Ténèbres et lumière, which enjoyed record-breaking visitor numbers. Dr Payne, a leading expert on the artist, contributed an essay and several catalogue entries to the accompanying scholarly publication. This important exhibition marks the first retrospective dedicated to Ribera in France, covering every aspect of his varied career. It follows the first exhibition dedicated to Ribera in the UK, Ribera: Art of Violence, held in 2018–19 at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London (co-curated by Dr Payne and Dr Xavier Bray), and the major exhibition of Ribera’s drawings, held in 2016–17 at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid (curated by Dr Gabriele Finaldi) and the Meadows Museum in Dallas (curated by Dr Payne). The online conversation will examine the curatorial strategies behind the Paris exhibition and discuss some of the questions it raises for further studies on the artist.

New publications of The Spanish Gallery Collection Studies Series (CEEH), 5th February 6pm

Claudia Hopkins, Xanthe Brooke, Piers Baker-Bates, Marta Cacho Casal, Holly Trusted, and Jonathan Ruffer will be discussing new publications of The Spanish Gallery Collection Studies Series (CEEH)’. This series commences with four volumes authored by distinguished experts on Spanish art, who conducted their research during a CEEH-funded fellowship at the Zurbarán Centre between 2021 and 2023:

Murillo’s True Portrait of the Holy King Ferdinand III by Xanthe Brooke
Artistic Exchanges between Spain and Italy, 1516-1621: Orrente Maíno, Tristán, and Cavarozzi by Piers Baker-Bates
Damaged Soul. Visual Cultures of the Repentant Mary Magdalene by Marta Cacho Casal
The Sculptural Works in the Spanish Gallery by Holly Trusted