The European Visual Culture Seminar

The European Visual Culture Seminar (established 1993) is organised by the Art History discipline of the University of Melbourne's School of Culture & Communication. It comprises staff and students from Melbourne, La Trobe and others academic institutions, as well as interested members of the public, whose research and study interests cover the diverse range of European art history, from the Middle Ages to the 20th centuries. Australian art topics are also discussed.

The range of methodological interests is wide - from patronage to portraits, architecture to artists, landscapes to lunancy, and treatises to theory. Presentations to the group are held once a month.

The EVCS prides itself on its approachable culture, that encourages extended discussion of papers in a friendly and supportive environment in which speakers can share their research and obtain thoughtful and in-depth feedback.

The EVCS meets once a month during semester, on a Tuesday evening at 6.30 pm, normally in Room 148 or 150 of the Elisabeth Murdoch Building, The University of Melbourne.

Afterwards all are welcome to adjourn for dinner in Lygon Street.

All are welcome to attend, including FAN members and members of the public.

Convenor

Mark Shepheard: shepm@unimelb.edu.au

Associate convenors:

Assoc. Prof. David Marshall: david.marshall@unimelb.edu.au

A list of papers is given below. Click on the links to download a pdf poster that includes an abstract.

Papers 2009

Monday 9 November: Speaker to be confirmed.

Monday 12 October: Speaker to be confirmed.

Monday 28th September: Piers Baker-Bates (Art History Department, Open University).

Monday 17 August: Dr Matthew Potter, University of Leicester: (Re)collecting 'home': acquisitions and imperial identities in Australian art galleries.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the worlds of art and empire appeared to be experiencing simultaneous and comparable change, achieving new levels of self-determination. In art the innovations of modernism promised a new age of autonomy; in politics the colonial system of empire was replaced by the more independent structure of Federation. How accurate is this model though: does this perspective perpetuate the ‘modernist myth’ regardless of the facts? This paper explores an alternative reading of the sophisticated exchanges and negotiations that continued to take place between Australian art galleries and their London agents at this time and how in turn these impacted on patterns of art collecting. British painting played an important role in the activities of a nation seeking to negotiate its own version of a British identity

Monday 13 July: Glenys Adams. A Re-examination of Guercino's Altarpiece for the Donati Chapel in the private rooms of S. Filippo Neri at S. Maria in Vallicella, Rome.

Guercino was well-known for his large-scale altarpiece paintings and yet he undertook a commission for a small altarpiece in a private chapel located behind the very public painting by Guido Reni of S. Filippo Neri in S. Maria in Vallicella, the main church of the Oratorians in Rome. His acceptance of the commission seems to reinforce the traditional view that Guercino 'played second fiddle' in Rome to Guido. This paper re-addresses the issue by examining the painting within the context of the Donati Chapel. It is argued that Guercino agreed to the commission to gain favour with the Oratorians, who had established a significant presence in Bologna, where Guercino based himself after Guido's death. It is also argued that Guercino's altarpiece is modelled on an unpublished painting by Guido.

15 June: Bruce McComish: Portraits of Andrea Doria, Sixteenth-Century Genoese Admiral and Statesman.

There are at least eight surviving portraits of Andrea Doria, the great sixteenth-century Genoese admiral and statesman, a remarkable number from a period when any single surviving portrait of a statesman is unusual. Several use the theme of Neptune and a range of classical imagery easy to interpret within portraits of the greatest admiral of his age. However, no really satisfying explanation has been made of the formal portrait Andrea Doria with a Cat. This paper draws on research in the great statesman to provide a more convincing interpretation.

18 May: Tim Ould: The Triumphal Carriage of Neptune in Jacopo Zucchi's Palazzo Ruspoli Galleria.

Jacopo Zucchi's Gallery in the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome (ca. 1586) draws on ancient and contemporary sources. Works of literature, painting, sculpture, coins and printed images were all drawn on for this major fresco decoration. Zucchi justified his choice of the Roman gods as the subject for his fresco cycle, writing 'It truly seemed that such a site demanded a suitable subject.' This paper will examine the triumphal carriage of Neptune in Zucchi's cycle, and will attempt to explain why it differs from the most famous depictions of the Roman god from his time.

20 April: Susan Russell: Salvator Rosa and Herman van Swanevelt

The influence of Claude Lorrain and Claude’s coeval, the Dutch ‘Italianate’ painter, Herman van Swanevelt (c. 1603-55), on Salvator Rosa’s landscape paintings has often been observed, yet because of Claude’s greater exposure in the literature of art history, Swanevelt’s role in Rosa’s development has not been so extensively considered. When Rosa (1615-73) arrived in Rome in the 1630s, however, Swanevelt was as well established as Claude. With consistent patronage from Rome’s noble families, he enjoyed a similarly elevated status as a landscape specialist. At the end of the decade, one of Rosa’s major commissions for the Este family also involved Swanevelt, and it is from around this time that Rosa’s landscapes show divergences from the style and subjects of his early Neapolitan views and genre subjects. Rosa’s landscapes became increasingly idiosyncratic, and the late works in particular reveal a heightened drama and expressiveness in which it is possible to see elements similar to those in Swanevelt’s prints and paintings produced during the 1630s, works that would have been known to Rosa before he left for Florence in 1640. This paper will examine Swanevelt’s role in the development of Salvator Rosa’s landscape paintings through an analysis of subject matter, compositional formulae and pictorial motifs.

23 March. John Weretka: Architectural Currents in Early Eighteenth-Century Rome

In architecture, as in the visual arts more generally, the early eighteenth century remains terra incognita. Roman architecture of this period remains chronically understudied, a legacy of the position of the city as the epicentre of the High Baroque style of Borromini and Bernini. Drawing on recent research, this paper will chart what happened to Roman church façade architecture in the period between 1690 and 1750, examining the principal trends, personalities and operational principles, and questioning the usefulness of the customary division of architects into 'Borrominismi' and 'Berninismi'.