This Thursday, September 8th at 5pm, Dr. Asen Kirin will be presenting “Exuberance of Meaning: The Art Patronage of Catherine the Great.” This talk kicks of the VCC Lecture series for the 2011-2012 academic year, so make sure to put this on your schedule! Kirin will be discussing a current exhibition which, according to the Lamar Dodd School of Art website, “intends to make a contribution to the current knowledge of patronage in eighteenth-century Russia and to our understanding of the perception of Byzantine culture in the era of neo-Classicism.” Interestingly, the curator of this exhibit plans to “accomplish this goal with a relatively limited number of objects—loans from a small number of museums in the U.S.A.” “The exhibition will illustrate the complex dynamic between the collection of historical art and the commissioning of new works of art during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96). The focus of the exhibition is on the particular manner in which Catherine applied not only her knowledge of ancient and medieval glyptic art but also her collection of carved gems to new works of art that she commissioned. This was a deliberate continuation of the centuries-old tradition of placing pagan, Greek, and Roman carved stones onto sacred Christian liturgical and devotional objects. The empress not only shared the Enlightenment sentiment that carved gems were essential material vestiges from the past, but she was also fully cognizant of the cultural meanings associated with the practice of collecting cameos. Accordingly, she addressed these cultural meanings in her art patronage.” For more information, visit: http://art.uga.edu/index.php?pt=4&id=179#
Happy 500th birthday to Giorgio Vasari, the “father” of art history! Noah Charney concisely hits some of Vasari’s past, present, and potential future contributions to the field in his article, “How [Vasari’s] Da Vinci Clue May Yet Unlock His Discipline’s High Tech Future.” Read the article here: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38192/happy-birthday-art-history-as-giorgio-vasari-turns-500-how-his-da-vinci-clue-may-yet-unlock-his-disciplines-high-tech-future/?page=1
The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery A lecture by SCAD Atlanta Art History professor Dr. Anne Leader. “My talk will present a relatively unknown fresco cycle that adorns the second story of the so-called “Orange Cloister” of the Florentine Badia, an ancient, powerful, and wealthy Benedictine monastery that underwent a thorough institutional reform in the early fifteenth century. Murals depicting the Life of St. Benedict were painted in the cloister between 1435 and 1439 at a time when the Benedictine Order in Italy was experiencing profound change as certain Italian houses undertook a reform of their monastic practice and a refashioning of their corporate identity. The Florentine Badia was one of four Italian monasteries to initiate a Reform Congregation in 1419, and the frescoes that decorate the Badia’s cloister served as a means to define what it meant to be Benedictine.” TONIGHT- September 2, 2010 - at 5pm in room S150 of the Lamar Dodd School of Art Covered in today’s issue of the Red & Black: http://www.redandblack.com/2010/09/01/author-talks-fresco-fascination/
From ArtInfo.com: Islamic Art Museum Reopens in Cairo After $10 Million Rehab According to the AFP, rare manuscripts of the Koran and a gold-inlaid key that opens the Kaaba, the sacred cube within the Grand Mosque in Mecca, are among the more than 100,000 items in the museum’s collection. The museum also houses what is believed to be the oldest extant example of Islamic currency, a gold coin dating from 697, less than 70 years after the death of Mohammed. Twenty five hundred pieces are currently on display. Read the entire article at: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/35478/islamic-art-museum-reopens-in-cairo-after-10-million-rehab/
Interested in becoming a docent for the new Student Docent program at the Georgia Museum of Art? The Georgia Museum of Art is accepting applications for the first year of its student docent program. Docents are volunteer gallery teachers who facilitate discussions with groups about works of art in the museum. Applicants may be either undergraduate or graduate students and may be from any major. Student docents will gain knowledge of museum operations, its collection, and special exhibitions and have the opportunity to enhance their skills in public speaking by giving tours to PreK-12 and university students. For more information and links to the application, please visit: http://www.uga.edu/gamuseum/education/student_docents.html
From the Georgia Museum of Art: Digging Daura, Letters from Emile Bernard Written by UGA art history major and summer intern Joanna Reising, this blog post series on GMOA’s blog Curator’s Corner (http://gmoa.blogspot.com) addresses the history behind the letters between Bernard and Daura. The museum houses these letters in the Daura archive. “Pierre Daura met Émile Bernard in 1914, when Pierre came to Paris and began work in Émile’s studio…During Pierre’s time in Émile’s studio, the two became close friends. Two letters sent from Émile to Pierre provide a small window into the relationship between the two.(3)…The first letter, undated but written around 1914, is a short message letting Pierre know that Émile stopped by to see him but no one was there. Émile says that he wants Pierre to come by his studio…On the back of the letter, Émile included two sketches of a nude woman. One sketch is done in graphite and is smaller and seems to be a preparatory study for the second sketch. The second sketch appears to be done in ink and ink wash and shows a light and airy representation of the female form. The sketch employs the dark contour lines that Émile was famous for, and suggests Émile’s emphasis on the generality of nature, which Émile mentions in his second letter to Pierre.” Read more at: http://gmoa.blogspot.com/2010/07/digging-daura-letters-from-emile.html
From TheArtNewspaper.com: Discovery of earliest illuminated manuscript! “What could be the world’s earliest illustrated Christian manuscript has been found in a remote Ethiopian monastery. The Garima Gospels were previously assumed to date from about 1100AD, but radiocarbon dating conducted in Oxford suggests they were made between 330 and 650AD. This discovery looks set to transform our knowledge about the development of illuminated manuscripts. It also throws new light on the spread of Christianity into sub-Saharan Africa. The Garima Gospels are preserved in an isolated monastery in the Tigray region, set among mountains at 7,000 feet. No other Ethiopian manuscripts can be dated from before the 12th century. So the Garima Gospels represent a unique survival of an early Christian text in sub-Saharan Africa—pre-dating all others by more than 500 years.” Read more: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Discovery-of-earliest-illuminated-manuscript%20%20/20990
For all of you art historians out there- who painted “The Virgin of the Rocks” ? Art critic Jonathan Jones believes that it’s actually a Leonardo. From ArtInfo.com: “What a difference a cleaning can make,” Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones writes in his latest column, describing The Virgin of the Rocks, a recently restored painting that the National Gallery in London has long attributed to Leonardo’s students. The museum said in a statement that, post-cleanup, “it now seems possible that Leonardo painted all the picture himself,” and Jones, who is perhaps the hardest-working scribe in the British Empire, concurs. According to Larry Keith, the museum’s director of conservation, varnish that was applied to the painting in the middle of the 20th century dulled its color and obscured its brushstrokes, leading scholars to doubt whether it was the work of Leonardo. With that material freshly removed from the painting, the museum’s curator of Italian Renaissance painting, Luke Syson, tells Jones, “We now have a picture which I believe is entirely by Leonardo.” http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/35202/the-virgin-of-the-rocks-its-a-leonardo-says-jonathan-jones/
For all you art history buffs- From msnbc.com: Earliest Icons of Peter and Paul Found in Rome “The images, which date from the second half of the 4th century, were discovered on the ceiling of a tomb that also includes the earliest known images of the apostles John and Andrew. They were uncovered using a new laser technique that allowed restorers to burn off centuries of thick white calcium carbonate deposits without damaging the dark colors of the original paintings underneath.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37845439/ns/technology_and_science-science/
TODAY: Thursday, May 20th at 5pm in room S151 of the Lamar Dodd School of Art, Wen-chien Cheng presents “The Simple Marriage, the Simple Life: Images of ‘the Ordinary’ in Village Wedding Painting in Song China (960-1279)” “Dr. Cheng teaches courses in Asian art and architecture. Her major area of research is Chinese paintings, with a special focus on genre scenes. Her current project, a book tentatively titled The Idealized and the Ordinary: Reading Images of Rustics in Song Paintings, argues that images of Song rustics, far from ideologically innocent, were grist for the mill in discourses of the contemporary elite on issues of governance, class, ritual, rusticity, and constructed personae.” http://www.arthistory.psu.edu/faculty/visiting/cheng.html
Now this is just amazing…. from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hellomightydog/sets/72157623145352470/
Dr. Susan SidlauskasA.G.A.S. LecturesLecture: April 8th, 2010, 5:00 PM Sargent’s Bodies and the Unmaking of History “ The idea of an unmaking, or dismantling, of recognizable form was a founding trope of abstraction.  In this talk, Dr. Sidlauskas will argue that such an approach to the portrait could generate profound shifts in meaning and purpose of representation.” http://art.uga.edu/index.php?pt=4&id=133
A.G.A.S. Lecture - Dr. Ronda Kasl Lecture: February 4th, 2010, 5:00 PM Main Art Building, Room S150 The devotional use of lifelike images of the infant Christ, so-called “holy dolls,” was one of the most widespread religious practices of the 17th century… http://art.uga.edu/index.php?pt=4&id=132#
unhappyhipsters: You can come out when you can properly explain the differences between Modernist architecture and postmodern ornamentation. (Photo: Craig Cutler; Dwell, February/March 2006) Submitted by Elliot Stokes and Kate Dirschl
VCC Lecture -‘Practical Devotion.’ Apotropaism and the Protection of the Soul, Dr. John Decker January 28th, 2010, 5:00 PM, Room S150, LDSOA Dr. John R. Decker is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He recently published The Technology of Salvation and the Art of Geertgen tot Sint Jans (Ashgate, 2009; www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754664536).