The BSR Podcast

A lecture by John David Rhodes (BSR; Cambridge). Many of the spaces and thoroughfares that we take for granted in the centre of Rome are the results of brutal practices that reshaped the city only several decades ago. While every power that has ruled Rome sought–with varying degrees of intensity and success–to fashion the city in its own image, Fascism’s sventramento (disembowelling) of several of Rome’s neighbourhoods left a spatial and visual legacy that is troubling and difficult to pin down. This talk will range across documentary filmmaking, photography, painting, official planning discourses, and other materials in order to describe a sense of how Rome’s disembowelling is a critical element that must be considered in order to grasp the social and aesthetic specificity of modern Rome and Roman modernism.

A lecture by Mark Somos (BSR; Sussex; Harvard)

G.E. Rickman Lecture by Nicholas Purcell (Oxford). In this lecture, Nicholas Purcell revisits the social, financial, and cultural environments of merchants engaged in overseas trade with the city of Rome. He looks at the changing role of those we readily classify as ‘merchants’ or ‘traders’ in new ways, asking whether our standard scholarly representations of ‘exchange’, ‘commerce’, or ‘trade’ all too conventional.

A lecture by Catherine Fletcher (Swansea). Rai Uno’s new show I Medici – known in English as Medici: Masters of Florence – has proved an extraordinary success on Italian television. In this talk, Catherine Fletcher explores its depiction of the Medici family and the debate it has prompted about the relationship between historical fact and fiction. She draws on her own experience of writing a biography of Alessandro de’ Medici (Il principe maledetto di Firenze/The Black Prince of Florence) to consider the challenges of presenting this complex past to contemporary audiences, and looks at the ways that social media interaction can change viewers’ experience of historical TV.

A lecture by Amy Russell (BSR; Durham)

BSR-Corning Museum of Glass David Whitehouse Memorial lecture by William Gudenrath (Corning Museum of Glass)

A lecture by Annalisa Marzano (BSR; Reading)

A lecture by Phil Perkins (BSR; Open)

A lecture by Mary Jacobus. To launch her book Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton University Press, 2016), Mary Jacobus explores the use of quotations in one of his major paintings.

The American painter Cy Twombly (1928–2011), who lived in Rome from the 1950s onward, often spoke of himself as a ‘Mediterranean’ painter. His vast tripartite canvas, Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor, spans two decades and was finally completed to coincide with his 1994 MoMA retrospective.
Previously known as Unfinished Painting, it exemplifies Twombly’s use of quotation. Say Goodbye includes a palimpsest of passages drawn from Rilke, Cavafy, and Seferis, among others. At a distance, it appears empty. Close-up, it provides a literary archeology.
How much do we need to know about Twombly’s quotations and how do they affect the viewer’s experience of his work?

A discussion with UK and Italian think tanks ResPublica and Trinità dei Monti. Welcome and introduction by Christopher Smith (BSR), Pierluigi Testa (Trinità dei Monti), Jill Morris CMG and Daniele Frongia, Deputy Mayor of Rome.

‘The economics of beauty’ presented by Annalisa Cicerchia (Fondazione Symbola).

‘The community’s right to beauty’ by Duncan Sim (ResPublica Foundation)

‘The regeneration of Dundee’ by Philip Long (V&A Museum of Design Dundee)