This interdisciplinary conference examines the circulation of music and musicians throughout the Mediterranean diaspora. It concentrates on music as a migratory frontrunner and privileges displacement as its critical lens with the specific aim of crystalizing new theoretical approaches to mobility.... Read more about Conference: Music in the Mediterranean Diaspora
In 1616, Monteverdi told Alessandro Striggio that he couldn’t imitate winds because they are not human. “Ariadne moved us because she was a woman and similarly Orpheus because he was a man.” But what if Orpheus was not a man driven by his own internal passions and creative instincts but instead was an automaton—an inanimate machine with spontaneous motion and sound creation.... Read more about Thursday Seminar: What if Orfeo was an Automaton?
Until about 50 years ago, the prevailing account of Boccaccio’s Decameron was of an unreflective celebration of the natural, especially sexual, world, which in turn was said to play an equally unreflective role in the emergence of the kind of secularly based realistic representation whose history Auerbach sketches and celebrates in Mimesis. ... Read more about Thursday Seminar: Boccaccio’s Giotto and Cavalcanti: Nature, Art, Knowledge
Istituto degli Innocenti, Sala Brunelleschi Piazza della Santissima Annunziata 50121 Firenze
6:00pm
The Renaissance is a historiographical fable of the nineteenth century. Twentieth-century art history was shaped by various forms of dissatisfaction with the patterns and priorities it imposed. Few scholars, however, grasped the unresolved tension within the concept of Renaissance between an affirmative unrest (rebirth, a beginning) and the promise of closure through integration (the classic, an endpoint).... Read more about “Gombrich on the Pleasures and Perils of Circular Thinking”
Lecture 3: Bodyguards.
