Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture

The Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture is named in honor of Patricia H. Labalme (1924–2002), a noted scholar of Renaissance history and a specialist on Venice, who served on the Academy’s Board of Trustees from 1979 to 1999. The Friends of the Library supports the AAR Library through annual dues and special initiatives, also raising awareness of the library’s resources through regular programs.

Alina Payne – Architecture, Words, and the Limits of Drawing

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation

Sheepskin parchment (photograph provided by William Cowley)

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN CANCELED.

Alina Payne will deliver the American Academy in Rome Friends of the Library Lecture for 2019–20. Her talk is titled “Architecture, Words, and the Limits of Drawing.”

Payne is Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and Paul E. Geier Director of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She is the author of The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture (1999), Rudolf Wittkower (with Francesco Peri, 2011), From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (2012), The Telescope and the Compass: Teofilo Gallaccini and the Dialogue between Architecture and Science in the Age of Galileo (2012), and L’architecture parmi les arts: Matérialité, transferts et travail artistique dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (2016). Payne has edited numerous volumes of essays including, most recently, Renaissance and Baroque Architecture (2016), Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (with Gülru Necipoglu and Michele Bacci, 2016), and Revision, Revival, and Return: The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century (with Lina Bolzoni, 2016). In 2006 Payne was awarded the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities (2006–12). She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The lecture will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

Canceled
Event does not include video

Andrew Robison – Piranesi Connoisseurship: The AAR’s Special Copy of the “Antichità d’Albano” (1764)

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
AAR Zoom
Central European Time
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Andrew Robison - Piranesi Castel Gandolfo

Detail of plate XXII of the Antichità d’Albano (1764): “Elevazione e prospetto d’ un’ altra piscina esistente nella vigna de’ PP della Compagnia di Gesù a Castel Gandolfo”

For centuries Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s magnificent etchings and books have been the most influential images of ancient Roman architecture, both in fact and in fantasy. They were so much desired, and so many copies of Piranesi’s works have flooded the world, that it is hard to sort out which ones are actually the closest to what their author wanted, and the best as works of art. The American Academy in Rome has one of the finest copies of Piranesi’s fundamental 1764 book on the antiquities of Albano.
 
On Tuesday, February 9, Andrew Robison, a prominent Piranesi scholar and the now-retired senior curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, will situate the Academy’s copy of the Antichità d’Albano in Piranesi’s broader work and reveal the special qualities of this copy.

The Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Friends of the Library supports the Library through annual dues and special initiatives. The group also helps to raise awareness of the Library’s resources through regular programs. Join online today!

Off

Francesco Buranelli – Palazzo Farnese ovvero una Accademia “ante litteram”

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Palazzo Farnese ovvero una Accademia 'ante litteram'

Francesco Buranelli, Segretario della Pontificia Commissione per i Beni Culturali della Chiesa/Secretary of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church, will give the Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture entitled “Palazzo Farnese ovvero una Accademia ante litteram.”

The Palazzo Farnese continues to fulfill a major role in European culture, approximately five hundred years after its construction under the direction of Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, 1468–1549, pope from 1534) and his Cardinal nephews—the “grand” Cardinal Alessandro, Ranuccio and Odoardo. This was demonstrated by the exhibition on the Palazzo that the French Embassy in Rome organized last year. The Palazzo’s “cultural vocation” has deep roots and was developed through a careful and visionary initiative of the Casa Farnese, which called on the best architects, decorators, and artists of the Renaissance, as well as the most accomplished humanists of the time, to work on it. This Academy ante litteram never faltered and regenerated itself over the centuries. Today we can appreciate all that it continues to offer.

The lecture will be held in Italian. Seats available on a first-come, first-served basis.

David I. Kertzer & Mauro Canali – New Perspectives on the Fascist Ventennio: What the Archives Reveal

Conversations/Conversazioni
Bodies of Knowledge
Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture - David I. Kertzer and Mauro Canali

This event is part of the New Work in the Arts & Humanities: Bodies of Knowledge series.

Italy has gone through a variety of phases over the past seventy years in trying to come to terms with its Fascist past. Yet this history still remains a painful one. All too often myth and wishful thinking take the place of dispassionate analysis and the facing of uncomfortable truths. In trying to reconstruct this history, deep archival research is essential. Two of the scholars who have published influential archivally based recent work that casts new light on the Fascist period engage in a conversation about how their findings from the archives have brought dominant narratives about this history into question. They discuss what they have found to be the most valuable sources in both the civil and ecclesiastical archives for shedding new light on this history, and they discuss the question of whether all relevant documents have been made available to scholars.

David Kertzer is professor of social science, anthropology, and Italian studies at Brown University (2000 Resident), and Mauro Canali is professor of contemporary history at the University of Camerino.

The event will be held in English and Italian with simultaneous translation available.

With the support of the United States of America Embassy to Italy.

David McCullough – Standing the Test of Time: Reflections on the Craft of Writing

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Villa Aurelia
Largo di Porta S. Pancrazio, 1
Rome, Italy
Lecture/Conversation
Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library - Rome

David McCullough is one of the United States’ foremost historians and one of the most recognized writers of today. Setting him apart from other historians is his highly celebrated style, which captures his readers and merges the boundaries between history and literature. According his own recognition, he was deeply influenced from his studying and reading of fiction. The issue of how to accurately represent events within a work of history or one’s personal experience within a work of fiction or poetry is central to all scholarly and artistic endeavors. In his address to the Friends of the Library, McCullough will discuss his personal insights and experiences on the craft of writing and how writing history may resemble the art of writing fiction.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1933, McCullough is a graduate of Yale University, where he studied English literature. Since publishing his first work of history, The Johnstown Flood, in 1968, McCullough has won numerous honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and two Francis Parkman Prizes from the American Society of Historians. He is the recipient of America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and one of the few citizens to have spoken before a joint session of Congress. He has been honored with as many as thirty-one honorary degrees, is a past president of the Society of American Historians, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Friends of the Library, founded in 1961 by library readers, helps build library collections with annual dues and special initiatives. In addition to providing important financial support for acquisitions, the Friends of the Library has helped to raise awareness of the library through regular programs presenting the works of its readers.

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Teodolinda Barolini – Dante’s Sympathy for the Other or the Non Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racial Others in the “Commedia”

Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture
Knickerbocker Club
807 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY
United States
Lecture/Conversation
Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library - New York

Join us for the annual Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library lecture in New York, featuring Teodolinda Barolini (2012 Resident), the Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University and chair of the Department of Italian.

Barolini argues that Dante’s radical historicity may function as a prophylaxis against stereotyping and that in any case—whatever the cause—he possesses a nonstereotyping imagination. Immersing the Commedia in historical context allows us, with surprising frequency, to see the absence of a normative response on Dante’s part. Using contemporary images in order to allow the audience to gauge a normative response, Barolini looks at Dante’s treatment of both sexual and racial others in the Divine Comedy.

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