23 September

2008

Tuesday

Shoptalk   by Visiting Professor Jaynie Anderson

Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891): Behind the Pseudonym

Towards an Intellectual Biography

24 September

2008

Wednesday

25 September

 2008

Thursday

at 5.30 p.m.

Play

A private performance by

The Garden Suburb Theatre

The Old Masters

by Simon Gray

(By invitation only)

2 October

2008

at 2.30 pm

Thursday

Bernard Picart, Villa Rotonda,

from The Architecture of A. Palladio in Four Books

(vol. 1, book 2, plate XV), 1715

8 October

2008

at 5.00 pm

Wednesday

 Concert

Dietrich Buxtehude:

Ciaccona, il mondo che gira

Stylus Phantasticus

 with

Maria Cristina Kiehr (soprano)

(Early Music at I Tatti, XIII)

“Sol et ejus umbra perficiunt opus”.

From Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1617)

9-11 October

2008

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

International Conference

Herbert Horne’s Botticelli: The Scholar and the Painter

A Conference to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of a Landmark Monograph

A collaboration between I Tatti, Syracuse University in Florence

and the Fondazione Horne

This conference celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of Herbert Horne’s Alessandro Filipepi Commonly Called Sandro Botticelli, Painter of Florence. Upon its publication in 1908, Roger Fry recognized Horne’s monograph as a landmark not only in the study of Botticelli but in the emerging field of Renaissance art history:

It is hardly too much to say that since the study of Renaissance art began to assume systematic form in the early nineteenth century until the present day, nothing has been produced quite comparable to Mr. Horne’s new work. It has the monumental appearance and the dignity of style of a work of the Renaissance itself.

How well Horne’s monograph has stood the test of time was attested by John Pope-Hennessy, who described it in 1979 as “the best monograph in English on an Italian painter.”

The Villa I Tatti session of the convegno (9 October) considers Horne in the context of the English art world of a century ago. The session at Syracuse University (10 October) presents new research on Botticelli, building upon Horne’s fundamental contributions. The concluding session at the Fondazione Horne (11 October) explores the revival of interest in the late Quattrocento among critics, artisans, and collectors in Horne’s Florence.

• program (pdf)

15-17 October

2008

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

International Conference

Artful Allies

Medici women as cultural mediators (1533-1743)

Villa I Tatti
The Harvard University Center
for Italian Renaissance Studies

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
Max-Planck-Institut

The establishment and preservation of the Medici principate was linked to an international marriage policy through which the rulers of Tuscany strove to win powerful allies and to promote their dynastic ambitions. This conference explores the patronage of women who became involved in such marriage strategies and who were consequently in a position to act as cultural (and sometimes also political) mediators between two European courts. The chosen timeframe encompasses the two centuries of the Medici principate between the wedding of Caterina de’ Medici (1533) and the death of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici (1743). Protagonists of the conference are the French queens Caterina and Maria de’ Medici, the Grand Duchesses Eleonora di Toledo, Giovanna d’Austria, Cristina di Lorena, Maria Maddalena d’Austria and Vittoria della Rovere, the Archduchess Claudia de’ Medici, the Princess Violante Beatrice di Baviera, and the Electress Palatine Anna Maria Luisa de‘ Medici. The papers will examine the role of women from the Medici family at other courts as well as the cultural initiatives of the “foreignˮ women who became Grand Duchesses of Florence.

Allegory of Prudence

(Palazzo Pitti, Sala della Prudenza)

• program (pdf)

21 October

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - William R. Day

Florentine and other Italian Personnel in Foreign Mints, (1200 - 1500)

23 October

2008

at 5.30 pm

Thursday

 Public Lecture   Edward Goldberg

The Prince and the Kabbalist

For six years (1615-1621), Benedetto Blanis - a Jew in the Florentine Ghetto - served as as librarian to Don Giovanni de’ Medici, illegitimate son of Grand Duke Cosimo I. In fact, Benedetto was Don Giovanni’s Jewish master of the arcane and together they explored the by-ways of alchemy, astrology and Kabbalah. In the summer of 1620, Benedetto disappeared into a Florentine prison where he remained for several years - amidst a flurry of charges ranging from usury to sorcery to the abduction of Jewish children in order to thwart their conversion to Catholicism. Using hundreds of newly discovered documents, we can trace the complex relationship between these two remarkable individuals, learning much about the opportunities and dangers of the world they lived in.

4 November

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Arielle Saiber

Well-Versed Mathematics in Early Modern Italy (1450 - 1650)

11 November

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Patrick Nold

Heresy and Orthodoxy in early Trecento Florence

13 November

2008

at 4.00 pm

Thursday

Shoptalk - Nick Terpstra

Life and Death in a Cinquecento Conservatory for Abandoned Girls

18 November

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Roberta Mucciarelli

Bisogna essere molto prudenti con le voci. Fanno presto a trasformarsi in verità. "Fama" e "publica vox" nell'Italia comunale (secc. XIII-XV). Prime indagini.

20 November

2008

at 4.00 pm

Thursday

Shoptalk - Fredrika Jacobs

Dialogues of Devotion: Renaissance Votive Panels in Context

25 November

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Denis Ribouillault

Villa Montalto in Rome and Sixte V's pastoral urbanism

2 December

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Laura Giannetti

Food Culture and the Literary  Imagination in Renaissance Italy

4 December

2008

at 4.00 pm

Thursday

Shoptalks

John Paoletti

"Michelangelo's David: Naked Men in Piazza"

Michael Rocke

"Michelangelo and l'amore mascolino"

9 December

2008

at 3.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalks

Catherine Kovesi

Barbara Deimling

13 January

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Benjamin Brand

Cathedral Liturgies in the Golden Age of the Tuscan Communes

3 February

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Camilla Russell

Imagining the Indies: Conceptualising the Jesuit Missionary Enterprise in the Italian Renaissance

17 February

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Anne Leader

Burial Practices in Renaissance Florence

24 February

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Klaus Pietschmann

Liturgical polyphony in Florence between reform theology and local politics

10 March

2008

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Mario Casari

The Oriental Studies of G.B. Raimondi in Late Renaissance Italy

31 March

2009

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Roberto Cobianchi

Ceremonies for Canonisation in Renaissance Rome

2 April

2009

at 4.00 pm

Thursday

Shoptalk - Guido Ruggiero

A Woman as Savior: Alibech and the Last Age of the Spirit in Boccaccio's Decameron

7 April

2009

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Bianca de Divitiis

Giovanni Pontano and the Idea of Authorship

14 April

2009

at 5.30 pm

Tuesday

Visiting Professorial Talk - Erling Skaug

23, 28, 30 April
2009

at 6.00 pm

The Bernard Berenson Lectures

Julian Gardner, University of Warwick

Giotto and His Publics: Three Paradigms of Patronage

Thursday, 23 April
Giotto at Pisa: The Stigmatization for San Francesco

Tuesday, 28 April
The Bardi Chapel: Giotto among the Money-changers

Thursday, 30 April
The Lull before the Storm : The Vele in the Lower Church at Assisi

• invitation (pdf)

5 May

2009

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Kathleen Christian

Geniuses of the Place: Nymphs in Italian Renaissance Art

7 May

2009

at 4.00 pm

Thursday

Shoptalk - Renee Baernstein

L'Ufficio della Scrittura: Colonna Women's Letters between Private and Public in the Sixteenth Century

12 May

2009

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Robert Kiely

Sodoma's Fresco Cycle of the Life of St Benedict at Monte Oliveto Maggiore

14 May

2009

at 5.30 pm

Thursday

Discussion

19 May

2009

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Wietse de Boer

Castiglione, History, and War

20 May

2009

at 6.00 pm

Wednesday

27 - 30 May

2009

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

International Conference

San Lorenzo: A Florentine Church

The San Lorenzo Monograph Project is a collaborative research project sponsored by Villa I Tatti.

Sponsored by the I Tatti San Lorenzo Monograph Project

Florence's Basilica di San Lorenzo, the city’s first cathedral and the center of liturgical patronage of the Medici and their grand ducal successors from the late Trecento until the nineteenth century, is one of the most frequently studied churches in Florence. Modern studies have tended, however, to focus on specific aspects of the complex, and the lion’s share of research published since the nineteenth century deals with the period from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, or from Cosimo il Vecchio to Cosimo I. The aim of I Tatti's San Lorenzo Project is to produce a comprehensive interdisciplinary monograph dealing with many aspects of the basilica, extending from its foundation as Florence’s palaeochristian cathedral to the modern era.  

The I Tatti San Lorenzo monograph project aims to produce a new kind of monograph, bringing scholars from disparate fields into a long-term collaboration, in a way that will, we hope, help to expand the field of inquiry within each individual discipline as well.

• program (pdf)

4 June

2009

at 4.00 pm

Thursday

Shoptalk - Dávid Falvay

9 June

2009

at 6.00 pm

Tuesday

Public Lecture  Christoph Luitpold Frommel

Michelangelo, i Cristi risorti

della Minerva e di Bassano e il giovane Bernini

Nel 1618 Maffeo Barberini prende in considerazione l’idea di far finire da Bernini  il blocco abbozzato nel 1514 da Michelangelo per la Minerva e poi abbandonato a causa di  una vena nera. Bernini lo  reinterpreta poi per la Cappella Giustiniani situata a pochi passi dalla seconda versione del Cristo di Michelangelo. La conferenza si concentrerà sul dialogo affascinante tra i due massimi scultori post-antichi.

Giustiniani Christ (Bassano Romano, S. Vincenzo Martire)

11 June

2009

at 6.00 pm

Thursday

(NOTE NEW TIME)

“Curiose et moderne inventioni”

The birth of the trio sonata

 Baroque Fever

(Early music at I Tatti, XIV)

16 June

2009

at 4.00 pm

Tuesday

Shoptalk - Bram Kempers

18 June

2009

at 6.00 pm

Thursday

(NOTE NEW DATE)

Public Lecture James Bradburne

 ‘Oh Brother is this not vanity?’

The life and times of a B-list Renaissance inventor

Born in Alkmaar in 1572, Cornelis Drebbel has been all but forgotten, save as the inventor of an optimistically named perpetuum mobile. In his own time, however, he enjoyed substantial fame and even fortune, before finishing his life in poverty running a tavern on the banks of the Thames in London, where he died in 1633. This talk looks at the life and times of Drebbel and some of his more famous contemporaries, and at whether or not his near oblivion is deserved.