Saturday, December 7th Live on Zoom
7pm Italy, 10am Los Angeles, 1pm New York
The rich collection of art amassed by the Farnese family in the 16th century is notable for monumental ancient sculptures, oil paintings by artists such as Titian, frescoes by the Carracci, lavish decorative arts, an impressive array of ancient coins and medals, and shelves of books in Greek and Latin. But alongside these splashier treasures, an important collection of drawings was being collected within the family headquarters in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome. The protagonists of the drawings collection were not the powerful Pope Paul III or his grandson cardinals, but the intellectual men who ran and lived in their Roman palace: the major domo, the resident artist, and the family curator and librarian. The history of how the famed Farnese Collection came together, the over 800 drawings it contained at its height, and how these hundreds of drawings diminished to the mere 57 remaining today traces a story of the highest echelons of intellectual collecting in the 16th century. And it has a denouement with a drama worthy of an opera libretto.
Dr. Van Cleave is an expert in Renaissance art, with a specialization in Italian drawings. A Chicago native, she did her undergraduate studies at Georgetown University, completed her M.A. at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and her doctorate at the University of Oxford. She is author of Master Drawings of the Renaissance, and co-author of Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum and curated the drawings galleries for the Luca Signorelli exhibition at the National Gallery of Umbria, Perugia, in 2012. Recently, she has been researching and writing about the drawings collected in Rome’s Palazzo Farnese in the 16th century, the remnants of which are now housed at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples.
To RSVP: Paola50122@gmail.com
Minimum suggested donation: $28
This talk is free for Friends of Paola's Studiolo!
Look forward to seeing you on Zoom!
