The Course Register 2021
Vivi Asbury, Florence Black, Georgina Brainerd, Matilda Brett, Daisy Butt, Sofia Ceva, Cosima Davenport, Daniel Duffy, Lucas Galarza, Philip Gray, Jack Hall, Kingston Herbert, James Keeley, Emilia Luders, Sasha Qvist, Angus Stainton, Chelsea Tabachnik, Edith Thompson.
Florence/Rome: Tatiana Addyman, Christian Amell, Honor Cockroft, Hamish Dicketts, Helena Dobbs, Finn Kverndal, Flavian Roberts, Eleanor Smith, Eleanor Wheatley
Record of Past Programme
The John Hall Venice Course 2021
THE PROGRAMME
June 14 – July 30
Directors: John Hall & Charlie Hall
Accommodation
Venice. Hotel Pausania
Lectures: Istituto Canossiano, Venice
Lecturers and Syllabus
LOUISA BUCK MA Cambridge, MA Courtauld Institute, Journalist, broadcaster and art critic, reviewer for Radio 4’s “Front Row”. Author of “Moving Targets : A Users’ Guide to British Art Now” - published by Tate Gallery Publications and “Owning Art: the Contemporary Art Collectors Handbook” Turner Prize Judge 2005. Contemporary Art Correspondent for The Art Newspaper and a regular contributor to Artforum, Vogue and The Guardian.
Body Matters: Representing the human figure in contemporary art
Peggy Guggenheim, Art Addict; a lifetime of collecting
The Venice Biennale; a barometer of the art world
Contemporary Art
PATRICK CRAIG is a counter tenor, harpist, teacher, lecturer and conductor. He is a Vicar Choral at St Paul's Cathedral and over twenty years has sung more than a thousand concerts with the Tallis Scholars.
The tradition of classical music in Europe
Chant and polyphony in the western tradition; Monteverdi and the Venetian revolution; the contribution of Bach and Handel; the Creation of the Modern Orchestra
FRANK DABELL studied at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is a former fellow of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. After many years in New York, he returned to Rome, where he was raised, and is now part of the art history faculty at Temple University Rome
Medieval and Gothic Art
Giovanni Bellini, Cima and the beginning of the Venetian School
The High Renaissance: Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto
The Venetian school of the 18th century
GREGORY DOWLING MA (Oxon.), is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Venice, has written thrillers set in Italy and England, translator.
English poets in Italy
Byron in Venice; Shelley; Keats and Imagination; Browning and Italy
Humanism ; the Enlightenment ; Romanticism
CHARLIE GERE is professor of media theory and history at the University of Lancaster
What is Digital Culture and why does it matter?
AI, Sureveillance Capitalism and the end of the human
Networks, smart phones and the collapse of Liberal Democracy
CHARLIE HALL
The Medicis – the family who bankrolled the Florentine Renaissance
Why Are We Here? Venice, from Late Antiquity to the Byzantine Rule in Ravenna
CHARLES HOPE MA, D.Phil., Director of the Warburg Institute, London University. Formerly Slade Professor of Fine Art, Oxford University. An Organiser of the Genius of Venice exhibition at the Royal Academy, author of “Titian”, and other publications.
Giorgione and the limits of connoisseurship
Giorgio Vasari and Art Histories
ANDREW HOPKINS was previously Assistant Director of the British School at Rome, from 1998 to 2002, and now Professor and Chair of Architectural History at the University of L'Aquila.
Venetian Architecture: The early settlement of Venice and the solutions to the environment, together with the use of light and water.
Venetian Architecture: The Expression of Wealth and status as well as the use of space in the public arena (the Piazza as Forum)
Venetian Architecture: The emergence of a specifically Venetian version of the Renaissance and Baroque, as distinct from the Florentine and Roman.
Venetian Architecture: How ‘ordinary’ people and those of minorities such as Greeks, Jews in the Ghetto and Slavs lived, worshipped, and built architecture.
GEOFFREY HUMPHRIES Portrait-figure artist, has lived in Venice for 40 years and exhibited throughout Europe.
Life drawing and portraiture classes
MARIE-LOUISE LEONARD is Research Fellow at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. A social and cultural historian of early modern Italy. Her primary research interests are health, disease, public health, and occupational health.
Venice, 1600 years of history
Plague and Public health in Venice, 1348 - 1630
NIGEL MCGILCHRIST MA (Oxon.), has lived and worked as an Art Historian in Rome for thirty years. He has taught at Rome University and has been Director of the Anglo-Italian Institute, and External Consultant to the Superintendence of Fine Arts of the Italian Government, during that period. He lectures for a consortium of American Universities, teaching the history of painting techniques and materials. A frequent contributor to the Arts Page of The Times, and a regular lecturer for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DCand San Diego Museum of Art, California.
MARBLE. The Brilliance of Ancient Surfaces: the Polychrome: Marbles of Antiquity
BYZANTINE ART: The Transformation of the Roman world: Ravenna and a new Christian civilisation
The Re-discovery of Coloured Marbles in Mediaeval and Renaissance Italy
MARCO POLO: Venice's Man of Marvels: From Stone to Sensuality: how Marble comes to life in Sculpture
DAVID NEWBOLD MA (Oxon.), MA(Reading) Linguistics, teaches English at University of Verona, author of English language teaching materials, education broadcaster, journalist, correspondent in Italy for The Times Educational Supplement.
Education in Italy
ENRICA ROCCA runs a cookery school with a difference. Born in Venice, Enrica is an Italian cook of note, a flamboyant and passionate chef and restaurateur.
Cookery Classes
MATTEO SANSONE Ph.D (Edin.) is an expert on operatic literature and his special field is late nineteenth-century Italian opera on which he has published several studies. He teaches Italian Opera at New York University in Florence and lectures at the British Institute of Florence.
The Operas of Monteverdi
Madness in opera: Antonio Vivaldi, Orlando Furioso (Venice, 1727) and Handel, Orlando (London, 1733), both after Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso
Madness in Romantic opera: Bellini, I Puritani (Paris, 1835) and Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor (Naples, 1835), after Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor
Blackface and opera: a sensitive issue. The case of Verdi’s Otello (1887), after Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice
MARK SMITH photographer, based in Venice, publications include “The Nude: a Visual Reference for the Artist” and “Palaces in Venice”.
Photography Classes
SUSAN STEER MA, Ph.D. Visiting lecturer in History of Art for the University of Warwick's "Venice term" BA and MA programmes. Susan has also lectured in the History of Art for the University of Bristol and has worked as both researcher and editor of the UK's national inventory of European paintings on behalf of the University of Glasgow and the National Gallery.
Visits throughout the city and lagoon islands, introducing the students to the less visited major works in Venice and the islands and teaching a useful method for looking at architecture and works of art.
DR. CLAUDIA TOBIN is a writer, curator and academic specialising in the intersections between literature and the visual arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is currently a Senior Research Associate at Jesus College, Cambridge and has taught art history and English literature at Cambridge and at Bristol University over the last seven years. She is the author of Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers (2020) and co-editor of Ways of Drawing: Artists’ Perspectives and Practices (2019).
Art and the Aesthetic Movement in 19th century Italy
The ‘Bloomsbury Set’ in Italy
BOYD VAN HOEIJ is a film critic with over a dozen years of experience reviewing for trade publications Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. He is also involved in film funding, film programming and film education, and has taught film grammar, film writing and film history short courses in many different countries, from Lithuania and the U.S. to Hungary and Ireland as well as back home in Luxembourg, where he’s based.
An introduction to ‘Film Grammar’
Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now as a case study for the importance of editing in creating atmosphere, meaning and unexpected connections
The Aesthetics of Tom Ford's A Single Man: Can a Film Be Too Beautiful?
LOUISA WARMAN BA Courtauld Institute, MA University of Warwick, is an Art Historian resident in Venice since 2000. She works as a translator for art history publications and leads Renaissance and Medieval art history tours in the city.
Visits throughout the city and lagoon islands, introducing the students to the less visited major works in Venice and the islands and teaching a useful method for looking at architecture and works of art.
JAY WEISSBERG is a New York-born film critic who lives in Rome. He has been reviewing films for the Entertainment industry trade paper, Variety, since 2003.
Film Making in Italy
ARTHUR WOOD is a founding partner of Total Impact Advisors in Geneva. He is a recognised innovator in social finance and is frequently invited to speak and write on innovative financing vehicles for social purposes.
The Road to hell is paved with good intentions – Bankers and the world
ROSELLA ZORZI Professor in American Literature, University of Venice. Director Società Dante Alighieri, Venice.
Henry James in Venice
Venice
Orientation walk-abouts (2); the Accademia Gallery; the Frari; S. Marco, Palazzo Ducale
Private visit to Guggenheim Collection of Modern Art
Private visits: with Nicholas True to S. Marco with the mosaics illuminated; with Deborah Howard to S. Giorgio Maggiore, now the Fondazione Giorgio Cini; to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Visits throughout the city and lagoon islands with Charlie Hall. The Zanetti glassworks on Murano
Visit to Ravenna - S. Apollinare in Classe; S. Vitale; Tomb of Galla Placida; Orthodox Baptistery; the Museum; S. Apollinare Nuovo.
Visit to Padua - the Scrovegni Chapel - Giotto; the Erimitani - Mantegna; the Santo, the Scuola del Santo – Titian.
Classes in Venice:
Life Drawing and Portraiture - Geoffrey Humphries
Photography – Mark Smith
Italian – The Istituto Venezia
Cookery – Contessa Enrica Rocca
Film Screenings
A Bout de Souffle (Godard, 1960 France)
La Dolce Vita (directed by Federico Fellini 1960, Italy
The Last Laugh (Germany, 1924, dir F.W.Murnau)
The Wind Will Carry Me (Iran, 1999, dir Abbas Kiarostami)
The Battle of Algiers (directed by Gillo Pontecorvo 1966, Italy)
A Room with a view (directed by James Ivory, 1985)
Florence
TOM TRUE & CHARLIE HALL
Introduction to Florence and on-site visits – Florentine Painting, Architecture and Sculpture
Uffizi Gallery, the Accademia (Private Visits)
The Medici Chapel, Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, S. Croce, Pazzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, the Duomo, Piazza della Signoria, the Bargello, San. Lorenzo, The Laurentian Library, Sta Trinita, Rucellai chapel, Orsanmichele, Ospedale degli Innocenti
San Marco, Galleria Palatina, Santa Felicità, Brancacci Chapel.
Visit to Gardens of Villa Gamberaia at Settignano.
Classes: Life Drawing at Charles Cecil Studio
Rome
FRANK DABELL & CHARLIE HALL
On first evening, a walk around the historic centre of Rome introducing its main landmarks and monuments to include Campo de Fiori area - Palazzo della Cancelleria, Palazzo Farnese and Palazzo Spada: the Ghetto area, the Capitol Hill and Michelangelo's Square, the Trevi Fountain; the Hadrianeum; and past the Pantheon to Piazza Navona
Visit to Borromini's Church of Sant' Ivo alla Sapienza followed by an Introduction to Rome by coach to include the Tiber and the Iola Iberian, Castle Spangle, St.Peter's, the Janiculum Hill, the 'Fontanone', Bramante's Tempietto, S. Pietro in Montorio, the Pyramid of Cestius & the Protestant Cemetery, the Baths of Caracalla, the Circus Maximus; the Via Appia Antica and the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and S. Giovanni in Porta Latina, S. Maria degli Angeli, Santa Constanza, S. Agnese fuori le Mura
Following days – visits to include:
Classical Rome and the Classical Survival in later epochs from the Capitol Hill into the Roman and Imperial Fora; the Colosseum; the Arch of Constantine, the church of SS.Cosman & Damian; Trajan's Markets and Column
The Heart of Rome: The Pantheon; Borromini's Church of Sant' Ivo alla Sapienza, The Caravaggio chapels in S. Luigi de' Francesi and Sant' Agostino, The Ara Pacis, and the Piazza di Spagna area.
The Borghese Collection (The Bernini sculptures and the paintings collection at the Villa Borghese) The Keats and Shelley Memorial House
Independent visit to the interior of St Peter's Basilica,
Private visits The Vatican Collections, including Cortile Ottagonale, Antiquities Collections, the Raphael Rooms and Sistine Chapel
Visit to Villa d’Este and Temple of Sibilla at Tivoli and lunch at the Ristorante Sibilla