Francis Morrone January–February 2023
Happy 2023!
I want to let you know what I have coming up in the next couple of months.
I have two lecture series, both on Wednesday afternoons from January 11 to February 8. These will both be by Zoom, which means they will be recorded in case you can’t make it to the live version. And, as I feel I should always point out, because I am not the one responsible for pressing the record button, you know they actually will be recorded.
One series is for the 92nd Street Y, Venice: 500 Years of Art and Architecture. Some of you attended my series Paris: 500 Years of Art and Architecture in May–June 2022 and London: 500 Years of Art and Architecture in September–October 2022, so you know what the format will be like: roughly a century a week, covering painting, sculpture, architecture, and decorative arts. Venice will have some slight differences. Where for Paris and London I took the story up through the 20th century, for Venice I will begin a century earlier (the 15th) and take the story through the 19th century, touching on the city’s 20th- (and 21st-) century fate at the very end. And for Venice I will also spend a little time on its role as a center of printing, publishing, and typographic design. These lectures will be on Wednesdays, 3:00–4:00, January 11 to February 8.
London and Venice are my two favorite cities in the world, and I’m really looking forward to this. This will also be the last of my 500-year surveys, for the simple reason that I’m now all out of cities. The cities I know especially well, the ones I’ve studied the most intensively, the ones in which I have led or could lead walking tours, are New York, Chicago (where I was born), Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., London, Paris, and Venice. I’ve been to many other cities, I’ve studied other cities, but I don’t know them well enough to do series like this. With Venice, I’ve saved the best for last.
For Scarsdale Adult School, I will be doing something quite different. The five-lecture series is called Presidential Libraries. The title is ever-so-slightly misleading. There have been official presidential libraries only since the 31st president, Herbert Hoover. But I am going to go through all 45 presidents who have completed their terms, from George Washington to Donald Trump, and I will say a little about each president (largely in the hope that I may shed some light on the more obscure presidents), and talk about their associated National Historic Sites (for example, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site), and other places one may go to study their presidencies, until we get to Mr. Hoover. At that point I will focus on the official libraries, their architecture and the resources they make available to scholars and to the general public. These lectures will be on Wednesdays, 1:00–2:00, January 11 to February 8.
I was that kind of insufferably nerdy kid whose principal pastime was memorizing long lists of things. Naturally, one of those lists was that of U.S. presidents. By the time I was ten, I could spout the list of presidents, their dates of service, where they were born, and at least one thing with which their presidency is associated. Of course, absolutely no one cared, and it didn’t get me better grades in school. But with this series I will feel for the first time, now that I am old, that my childhood efforts have borne fruit. Indeed, one of my goals for the time I have remaining is to find ways to make use of all the weird things I memorized as a kid.
You can register for the Scarsdale lectures individually. For the 92nd Street Y, you have to register for the whole series.
Some recommended exhibitions:
- The Morgan Library & Museum has, through February 19, an exhibit, She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C., on women’s lives in ancient Mesopotamia, including Uruk, the world’s first great city, which flourished for about 2,000 years, or five times longer than New York has existed. (Enheduanna, daughter of the Akkadian emperor Sargon the Great, is said to be the first named author in world history.)
- From March 10 to June 4 the Morgan will exhibit its world’s-best collection of drawings by the great Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), the extraordinary architect, draftsman, printmaker, and architectural theorist, known above all for his fantastic etchings. This exhibition of his drawings—not etchings—is a very rare event, not to be missed.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art has on view through October 29 a show drawn from its own holdings on New York Art Worlds, 1870–1890, exploring the art world—studios, schools, galleries, etc.—of New York during a time when the city emerged as a major center of the arts in America—though not quite yet the world. A great companion to this show is William Dean Howells’s wonderful novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, published in 1889. Some of you know that this is my favorite New York book, a panorama of the city of the 1880s, high and low. Among its principal characters are Angus Beaton and Alma Leighton, artists whose world in the novel is the world covered by the Met exhibit.
- You have until January 8 to see The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, which includes Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII (on loan from the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid), among much else, including the large Flemish tapestry Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books, designed by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, from a private collection. Some of you may remember the Met’s spectacular exhibition from 2014–15 of tapestries by Pieter Coecke van Aelst. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen at that museum—I returned week after week to see it. (I’d never been particularly interested in tapestries. That show changed that.)
- For forthcoming exhibits at the Met, I’m particularly eager to see Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, the first-ever exhibition of the paintings of the slave and artist who is the subject of the mesmerizing portrait by Velázquez, from c. 1650, that is in the Met’s permanent collection. The show opens on April 3.
- Finally, and best of all, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice, the first retrospective of Carpaccio ever to be held outside of Italy. This exhibition, through February 12, is an event of huge importance. Carpaccio (c. 1460–1525), one of my favorite painters (and one of John Ruskin’s, too) will figure prominently in my series Venice: 500 Years of Art and Architecture. After Washington, the show moves to the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, a building that will figure prominently in my series. The show won’t be seen in New York, alas, but is alone reason to take an overnight trip to Washington—or, for that matter, to go to Venice in the spring!
Thanks, and I hope to see you soon.
All my best,
Francis