Columbia University

The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies

ITALY AT COLUMBIA

 

A SERIES OF FREE PUBLIC LECTURES

BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS

 

TUESDAY OCTOBER 26 AT 4:10 PM

VITTORIA DI PALMA

Naples and Natural History on the Grand Tour

MONDAY NOVEMBER 8 AT 3:10 PM

DAVID ROSAND

Ut pictor poeta: Titan’s Early Mythologies

 

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 23 AT 2:10 PM

FRANCESCO BENELLI

The Architecture of Michelangelo

 

New York, NY— October 8, 2010 — Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America will host three lectures by prominent art historians who teach at Columbia University.  The Italian Academy is located at 1161 Amsterdam Avenue between 116th and 118th Streets. Admission is free. Please note that each of the lectures is part of a Columbia University course and will begin promptly at the noted time.

For further information, please contact Allison Jeffrey (aj211@columbia.edu).

Vittoria Di Palma is Assistant Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.  She is the co-editor of Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (Routledge: 2009) and her writing has also been published in AA Files, the Journal of Architecture, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.  She is currently writing a book on landscape and natural history in 18^th-century England.

Prof. Di Palma specializes in modern European architectural history and theory, with a particular concentration on eighteenth-century architecture and landscape. Her research focuses on connections between landscape and epistemology; ideas of the natural and the artificial; and, more broadly, brings art historical issues to bear upon architectural history, examining, for example, ways in which visuality, aesthetics, and perception inform our understanding of buildings and environments.

David Rosand is Meyer Schapiro Professor emeritus of Art History at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1964. His scholarship has focused on the Italian Renaissance and the art of Venice in particular, and on the history and criticism of the graphic arts.  His publications in the field include Titian and the Venetian Woodcut (1976--co-authored with Michelangelo Muraro), Titian (1978), Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (1982; rev. ed. 1997), The Meaning of the Mark: Leonardo and Titian (1988), Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (2001), and Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (2002).   In the area of American painting, another of his fields of interest, he has published Robert Motherwell on Paper: Drawings, Prints, Collages (1997) and The Invention of Painting in America (2004).  His latest book, a monograph on the art of Paolo Veronese, is scheduled for publication next year.

Prof. Rosand is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti and the Ateneo Veneto in Venice, and has served for many years on the board of the Renaissance Society of America, which has honored him with the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award (2007).  He is project director for Save Venice, Inc., an organization dedicated to the conservation of the art and monuments of the city on the lagoon.

Francesco Benelli draws upon his background as a practicing architect in his research in the history and theory of Renaissance and Baroque architecture, focusing on the era from the late fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century. His articles have addressed issues of design, building materials, structures, and the interpretation and acquisition of the Antiquity during the Renaissance. He has published work on the relation between structure and decoration and their theoretical discourse, from Leon Battista Alberti to Andrea Palladio.

Prof. Benelli is an experienced archaeological surveyor with a background in the conservation of public, private and monastic Medieval and Early Modern buildings and fortifications. He recently published articles on Rudolph Wittkower and Renaissance architecture and, utilizing the Wittkower archive, the influence of the German scholar on Colin Rowe. He is currently writing a book on architecture in painting from Giotto to Masaccio.