THE OXFORDITALIANASSOCIATION

HILARY, 2017

TOIA MAGAZINE # 78

BOTTICELLI REIMAGINEDA LECTURE BY DR ANA DEBENEDETTI, CURATOR OF PAINTINGS, V&A

L ast year’s Botticelli Reimagined exhibition, organised by the V&A in partnership with

the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, explored Botticelli’s artistic practice, his legacy, and the enduring impact of the Renaissance master upon artists, designers and art historians. After four centuries of oblivion, the dramatic rediscovery and reappraisal of Botticelli’s art established the near universal acclaim of today.

The lecture will look back at the origins of the project, its starting point and subsequent developments. The exhibition was the largest devoted to Botticelli since the 1930s, with over 50 original works. The research underpinning it and the accompanying catalogue has highlighted a variety of significant issues relating to Botticelli and his extraordinary posthumous legacy.

Having drawn attention to a range of promising areas of further enquiry, the exhibition, catalogue and two-day academic conference, held in May 2016 at the V&A, laid the way for more debate and new approaches. More specifically, it explored the extraordinary resonance of Botticelli’s images today, which

pose the following questions: Why is art effective and how does it challenge the way people look at pictures? In a society of mass media, saturated with a multitude of images, what do all of these images have to say about us and how we engage with them, as artists, designers and viewers, or perhaps mere consumers?

Ana Debenedetti is Curator of Paintings at the V&A with responsibility for oil paintings, drawings, miniatures and watercolours. She has written and published on Renaissance art, philosophy and poetry and holds a PhD in History of Art focusing on the artistic and cultural milieu of Quattrocento Florence, the interaction between philosophy and artistic literature through the work of

i The Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College, Woodstock Road, 7.30 p.m. drinks reception, 8.00 p.m. lecture, on Tuesday, 31st January, 2017 Entry: Members £2, non-members £5, students under 30 free of charge.

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Co-curator of the exhibition Constable: The Making of a Master (V&A, 2014-2015), Ana Debenedetti’s current projects include a book on Botticelli and the catalogue of the French drawings in the V&A. She is co-curator of Botticelli Reimagined and co-author of the accompanying catalogue.

For further information go to www.toia.co.uk

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Antonio Donghi, Woman at the Café, 1932

FUOCOAMMARE

TOIA MAGAZINE # 78

“A genuine triumph … moral courage and filmic artistry exist side by side” Sight and Sound

“Urgent, imaginative and necessary film making” Meryl Streep

Gianfranco Rosi’s beautiful, mysterious and moving film Fuocoammare is a documentary that looks like a neorealist classic. It is a portrait of Lampedusa, the Sicilian island, where desperate migrants from Africa and the Middle East arrive each year hoping for a new life in Europe: 400,000 in the last 20 years. Lampedusa has quietly become the tragic epicentre of the migrant experience: part holding tank, part cemetery.

The title refers to a wartime Sicilian song, about the bombing of an Italian warship in 1943 in port at Lampedusa, prior to the island’s surrender to the allies, and how the flames lit up the night: Che fuoco a mare che c’è stasera (“What fire at sea there is tonight”). Islanders in Lampedusa make a living from fishing. Generations have grown up and grown old with the fear of dying at sea. The endless tide of migrants has made that fear a daily reality.

Gianfranco Rosi enigmatically juxtaposes scenes, switching between the migrants’ daily, desperate landfall, and the everyday existence of one Lampedusa family and one young boy in particular, Samuele, whose uncle is a fisherman.

Rosi has recorded quiet details from indigenous Lampedusan lives at the periphery of something far more historically dramatic and sensational, but the quietly telling details are like jetsam, flung out centrifugally. The film does not take a view; it does not demand action. It simply shows us the details, and one can learn more from this film than from the nightly TV news.

i Film screening in the Lecture Theatre, Rewley House, OUDCE, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford, Monday, 23rd January, 7.30 p.m. In Italian accompanied by English subtitles. All welcome.

88 minutes Italian with English subtitles

For further information go to www.toia.co.uk. To view the trailer: go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=st22_s7BB1I

Gianfranco Rosi

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Dante Ceruolo talks to Mario Bolognari who recommended Fuocoammare as TOIA’s Hilary film. Mario, a speaker at the 2015 Oxford FT Literary Festival, is the Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology and Head of the Department of Modern Civilisation Studies and Classic Tradition at the University of Messina. Prolific author of more than 100 books, papers and essays, Mario served as mayor of Taormina, a mecca for writers and artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is the former Director of Taormina Film Fest, Italy’s oldest film festival, which was inaugurated in 1955 and has hosted over the years many stars of international cinema, including Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, Sophia Loren, Colin Firth, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, and Antonio Banderas.

Mario, you recommended this film (Fuocoammare). What were the reasons underpinning your choice?To begin with, the very current and pressing problem of thousands of people making the treacherous journey to Sicily and the south of Italy. It’s a dramatic reality, new and different in many respects. It tests complacently held embedded certainties and assumptions. It’s one of the extremely complex challenges posed by contemporary society and globalisation. Perhaps it is the most modern of historical scenarios we are facing.

Secondly, it’s a wonderful film; so good that it was nominated for the best foreign language film Oscar. Paolo Sorrentino, the last Italian film director to win an Oscar (La grande bellezza), said that Fuocoammare wasn’t worthy of one, which makes me appreciate the film even more. Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning film was typical of those appealing more to an American audience, in that it rehearses all of the most hackneyed and trite of stereotypes.

To what extent does Fuocoammare differ from other cinematographic representations of Sicily?As I was saying, this film shatters stereotypes and it portrays a cinematic representation of Sicily between documentary and fiction. Typecast beliefs are challenged because the life of the people of Lampedusa, like that of the young Samuele, is always and forever in a state of emergency: 400,000 “sbarchi” in the last 20 years and 15,000 people drowned at sea. This emergency unsettles a static and repetitive tradition and at the same time enflames feelings, passion and emotion. Whilst watching the film it is difficult to know if you should be on the side of the immigrants or not … that’s what makes it a masterpiece.

IN CONVERSATION …

We are living in a historical context in which we are witnessing an unprecedented, almost biblical flux of migrants, shaking the geo-politics of Europe. How do Sicilians respond to this?There isn’t one answer for everyone. Some people think that the little slice of well-being that they have carved out is under threat; others think that the only way to maintain the status quo is to help and welcome immigrants. There are others still who remember that Sicilians were once migrants and left for America and Northern Europe and that they were ill-treated, considered vagrants, mafiosi, immoral.

The fact remains, regardless of the view anyone holds, that doctors, nurses, coastguards, police officers, social workers, translators, mayors, teachers and the wider general public give up their time and energy, with honest dedication, to help refugees and migrants. These people may not understand the full import of what they are witnessing, but they are undertaking their duty all the same, saving human lives.

When you spoke so insightfully at a recent Oxford FT Literary Festival, you described Sicily as a backdrop, almost like scenery to a play. Can you expand on this notion? In your view is there an anthropological constant underlying cinematic representations of Sicily? The director Giuseppe Tornatore said that Sicily is cinema and maybe he is right to assert that. There is a cultural constant: theatrical representation, reciting a role on a stage, being an actor even within the intimacy of the family circle. In short, an inclination towards ‘cultural performance’ as explicated by Victor Turner. Sicily is a hierarchical society, organized and deferential in its own way. Each person plays a role and gives life to the character that has been assigned to him. The study of organized crime, for example, is of notable interest because it reveals its own form of staging or, in musical terms, a perfect score, well-structured, closed and complete within itself.

Mario Bolognari

Perhaps it is this recital of roles that constitutes the Sicilian cultural nucleus; it is something captured, described and enacted by Luigi Pirandello, rightly considered as a figure of genius.

And turning to contemporary fiction and narrative, thinking for example of Camilleri, an author who is very famous in the UK, or Agnello Hornby?Agnello Hornby’s La Mennulara (The Almond Picker) is a very good novel. It tells of Sicily’s transition from a rural society to a developed one, but a development without progress. It is not by chance that the book was received with such acclaim. Other Sicilian authors, such as Camillieri, do all share a common challenge. Once they have achieved success they are constrained by publishers, by careless friends, possibly even by an interior weakness, to write further variations on the same theme, to repeat themselves obsessively. Camilleri’s historical novels are worthy of a Nobel prize and my University Department nominated him to the Swedish Academy in 2015, but the rest of his output has become like a vast chain of mountains, pitched solely at garnering further commercial success. There are other writers whose use of language and narrative form is bracingly experimental, but they are little known abroad. For example, Domenico Cacopardo, Silvana La Spina, Emanuela Abbadessa.

There remain the classics of course, the poet Ignazio Buttitta, Gesualdo Bufalino, Vincenzo Consolo and, obviously, Leonardo Sciascia. Their sicilianità, in essence is nothing other than a metaphor of universality.

Recently the UK, in spite of Brexit, hosted two major exhibitions on Sicily at the Ashmolean and The British Museum. What is it that fascinates the British about the trinacria?I am really not sure how to answer this one! I imagine that the British are attracted by the exoticism or by a nostalgia for colonialism. I’m being ironic of course: these are stereotypes in themselves. Perhaps Sicily is a daydream mirroring what you would like to hear said. In the past eminent English figures discovered Sicily and elected it to be their adopted homeland. Think, for example, of the entrepreneurs in Marsala,

Palermo and Messina, or the writers and artists who put down their roots in Taormina, Lìpari and Siracusa. They brought with them their customs, values, and lifestyles to a place that willingly adapted to the new. In Taormina the most widely diffused type of garden you stumble upon is the English one, and of course here one can find the best gin and tonic and Martini cocktails.

To conclude, in your view, is it possible to describe the characteristics of an archetypal Sicilian or does this inevitably involve lapsing into stereotype? A society is always a complex nexus of elements and relations in interplay. A culture can do no other than reflect this complexity. To say the Sicilians think this, say that, and do the other is to make a generalization that simplifies what remains at heart multifaceted. Contemporary cultural anthropology attends to the social and focuses on the social dimension. Perhaps it is the concept of ‘cultural’ itself which is put in discussion.

Consequently the idea of an authentic, original and “true” Sicilian archetype would seem to be highly improbable. To be able to isolate this archetype one would first have to choose a period of history, a social class, a precise place, then a gender, a generation, a profession, and so on … In the end, I would be describing an individual in order to avoid generalisations and simplification. It’s inconceivable.

What can we do then? We can question the cultural processes of the interpretation of clearly defined historical and social facts, as we have seen earlier in the reply to the question about Sicilians and migration. In such a way we can extrapolate certain patterns of behaviour of Sicilians from the chaos of complexity, the ideas that they themselves elaborate in relation to their own behaviour, and finally, the narratives that they weave around their everyday lives. Only through this scientific process, albeit subjective and interpretative, can we know who the Sicilians are and what they want; not in a generalised way but with respect to a specific and well-defined issue.

All the rest is an illusion of knowledge, fabricated out of empty rhetoric and stereotype.

For further information go to www.toia.co.uk

TOIA MAGAZINE # 78

Simonetta Agnello Hornby

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“The first evangelist of reason”, according to Jeremy Bentham, Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) stands as a modern classic and a landmark of liberal reform in the field of criminal justice. As such, he has been the subject of endless and often contrasting interpretations. Since its publication in 1764, On Crimes and Punishments has been acknowledged worldwide as a node in political thinking and an impassioned agent of change inside the body politic of the Ancien Régime. This common view contrasts with other interpretations, usually by legal historians and political scientists, which emphasise the inner tensions in Beccaria’s main arguments on torture and the suppression of the death penalty. Indeed the over-arching value of human dignity parallels in the text the quest for order, political stability and social control all to be pursued in the name of utility, efficiency and State power.

The lecture shall discuss these contrasting perspectives within the wider contexts of both Enlightenment radicalism and the Habsburg government in Lombardy. It will provide a general reading of Beccaria’s work, of its main sources in Lockean philosophy and 18th-century sensationalism as well as of its success among French ‘philosophes’, British legal reformers and German-speaking jurists.

Promptly translated into French and other languages (English, German, Spanish), On Crimes and Punishments established enduring legal rights and constitutional criteria still currently accepted, such as the principle that prior to the sentence in court the defendant should be deemed innocent or Beccaria’s pleading for limiting the length of previous detention. The talk will also refer to Beccaria’s suggestions in the field of court procedure, decriminalization of offences causing no damage to the Commonwealth, and secularization of penal law: a key

TOIA MAGAZINE # 78

FROM CRIMINAL JURISPRUDENCE TO THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: CESARE BECCARIA AND HIS CONTEXT THE DOROTHY ROWE MEMORIAL LECTURE BY PROFESSOR RENATO PASTA, UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE

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Cesare Beccaria, Pinacoteca Brera, Milan

social and public issue which harked back to “the immortal President”, Montesquieu.

By severing human crime from sin, Beccaria followed a sensationalist tack developed by Locke, Helvétius and Condillac. Differently from Locke, however, he understood property as “a terrible and perhaps not needed right”, a radical view indebted to Rousseau and one which made the Milanese essayist into a “socialist”, as one of his most bitter critics quickly pointed out. There are good reasons to believe this indictment. Beccaria’s parting of crime and sin represented indeed a challenge both to the corporate order of

the Old Regime and to its inextricable connection of religion and State power. No wonder that the Roman Church put the book on the Index early in 1766. Beccaria’s understanding of the rule of law reflected the views of the young ‘philosophers’ of Il Caffè, the periodical which Pietro Verri edited in 1764-1766, and to which Beccaria contributed. Grounded in the Enlightenment and readily accepted by Voltaire, Condorcet and Thomas Jefferson, his perspective also tied in with Habsburg jurisdictionalism at home which reduced the power of the Church and eventually suppressed the Inquisition. The Imperial

government in Milan shielded our author and his friends from ecclesiastical encroachment, providing the pre-conditions for a relatively free discussion among equals. Beccaria’s booklet, with its emphasis on sensibility as an inescapable element of human equality, arose from this ideological framework and contributed to set Rousseau’s droit politique on firm footing. This short classic is still with us. As Voltaire recommended in his commentary, we should “often reread this work as that of a lover of mankind”.

Renato Pasta is Ordinary Professor of early-modern European history at the University of Florence. He took his first degree at the State University of Milan and his PhD from the History Department, Princeton University (1985). He taught as Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, the Collège de France and the University of Cambridge. In 1996-1997 he spent a year as Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His main research interests concentrate on the French Enlightenment and its diffusion, special attention being paid to the book trades and the learned institutions in eighteenth-century Europe. Among his works are a monograph on the Tuscan savant Giovanni Fabbroni (1752-1822), a volume on book diffusion and the history of reading (Editoria e cultura nel Settecento, Florence, 1989) and essays on the culture of the Enlightenment in Italy during the age of reforms. He has contributed to the edition of Beccaria’s correspondence (vols. III and IV of his Opere, Mediobanca, Milan, 1994-1996) and edited P. Verri’s Storia di Milano, vol. IV of P. Verri, Opere, Rome, 2009, under the general editorship of Prof. C. Capra. Pasta sits on the board of Archivio storico italiano and is a member of the board of the Swiss periodical, Beccaria.

For further information go to www.toia.co.uk

TOIA MAGAZINE # 78

i The Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College, 5.00 p.m., Thursday, 9th February 2017, followed by drinks reception. Free of charge. All welcome.

Portrait of Cesare Beccaria, The Metropolitan Museum, New York

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i Clara Florio Cooper Bursary Lecture, Blue Boar Lecture Theatre, Christ Church, on Wednesday 15th February, 7.30 p.m. drinks reception, 8.00 p.m. lecture. Free of charge. All welcome.

POETRY MATTERS

A New Year dawns and so we turn to Gianni Rodari to cheer us. Resistance fighter, communist, writer and journalist, Rodari (1920-1980) was most famous for his writing as fabulatore (storyteller). Recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1970, many consider him Italy’s most important contributor to twentieth-century children’s literature. He was author of Grammatica della fantasia (1973) in which he reflects on his own writing, observing his “arte di inventare storie” was influenced by French surrealism.

L’anno nuovo

“Indovinami, indovino,tu che leggi nel destino:l’anno nuovo come sarà?Bello, brutto o metà e metà?”

“Trovo stampato nei miei libroniche avrà di certo quattro stagioni,dodici mesi, ciascuno al suo posto,un carnevale e un ferragosto,e il giorno dopo il lunedìsarà sempre un martedì.Di più per ora scritto non trovonel destino dell’anno nuovo:per il resto anche quest’annosarà come gli uomini lo faranno.”

Hannah Kinney

My dissertation, After Giambologna: The Value of Replication and Material Innovation in Late Medicean Florence, explores a period in Florentine art that is often brushed aside due to its perceived imitative practices and lack of artistic innovation. My project evolves from a simple question: if replication was not a valuable practice in Grand Ducal Florence, then why did it flourish? I argue that replication was a valuable practice for both artists and the Medici. For artists, replication became a catalyst for material innovation. The Medici’s control of the circulation of cast copies was beneficial because it reinforced the fame of the originals and, ultimately, allowed them to use both original and copy politically.

Conducting research on this topic has been a constant pleasure, especially since it has allowed me to travel frequently to Florence. Hidden amongst the documents of the Archivio di Stato I have discovered many traces of these artists who in many cases have been lost to time. These documents have the power to make them and their work feel present though we are separated by centuries, a quite magical experience. The challenge of the project, and its joy, is contextualising and explicating what period viewers appreciated in the remarkable objects they produced.

Ben Kehoe

I’m a second year DPhil student at Wolfson College, Oxford. Broadly, I’m interested in the ideology of nationalism within the context of nineteenth-century Italy. More specifically, my research explores how the emergent idea of Italian nationhood was received by popular audiences in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in the 1840s and 1850s.

My research draws upon a diverse range of sources to examine both the diffusion of national discourses among urban and rural populations, as well as the ways ‘ordinary Tuscans’ were engaging with the new national ideal. Chiefly, I’m looking at data contained in the police records of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in order to reconstruct the circulation of political information among the general population of Tuscany.

THE CLARA FLORIO COOPER MEMORIAL BURSARY RECIPIENT LECTURES

Thanks to the generosity of Professor Richard Cooper and Professor Emanuela Tandello and their family, each year TOIA invites applications for a bursary from graduates researching any aspects of Italian culture. In 2016 the two bursaries were awarded to post-graduate students, Hannah Kinney, from Christ Church, and Ben Kehoe, from Wolfson College.

With a generous passion to share their research, Hannah and Ben will talk about their current work, what fires their interests, and how the bursary assisted them. It will be an event full of energy and insight and we’d like you to be part of it.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW

THE ROMAN ART OF DYINGA LECTURE BY DR PAUL ROBERTS, KEEPER, DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES, THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM

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In Roman society, just as in modern Italy, image and appearance were everything. In death, just as in life, there was a right way and a wrong way of doing things.

This talk uses examples from art and archaeology, from Italy and all areas of the Roman world, to examine what constituted a ‘good death’ – the art of dying well. We’ll also look at how the Romans commemorated death and dying in their art and how people throughout time have tried to interpret this.

The Romans had an idea of afterlife, but unlike Jews and Christians, no clear road map. To gain immortality, Romans needed to be seen after death, through portraits and inscriptions. The image and name of the deceased were all-important, from the wooden mummy portraits of Egypt to the stone portraits of Palmyra, the freedman monuments and sarcophagi of Rome and the gravestones of far flung Britannia.

For the Romans death, inevitable and non-negotiable, was to be accepted, and approached with dignity and bravery. Death was everywhere – even at the table – in a close link between dining and death. The bringing together of family and friends in eating and drinking gave a time and place to dwell on life and death and the absence of loved ones.

Throughout the empire, tombstones and sarcophagi, show the deceased reclining at a banquet, garlanded and holding drinking cups. Mosaics, wall paintings and even drinking vessels are sometimes decorated with scenes of death and skeletons. Feasting happened around and sometimes inside family tombs – sometimes even inside the tomb itself. Why exclude ancestors from the feast simply because they are dead?

When death finally, inevitably came, you faced it with virtus – ‘manly’ bravery and resolve. Your death spoke volumes about you and was a continuity of your good life. Better a noble suicide, than an unworthy life (and death). The emperor Nero died badly, in a forced bungled suicide, begging for life. His teacher, Seneca, killed himself calmly in the bath. A ‘good’ death wasn’t restricted to men, and numerous women were praised for their noble death, most famously Cleopatra whose death rendered her almost Roman.

For some death was a way of life. Gladiators were the mass entertainers of their day, the sports, film, TV and music stars all rolled into one. Their often lethal combats were certainly a spectacle, but were also an example of how to face death with manly bravery. Add to that their undeniable sex appeal and they became important symbols.

The people who learnt most from the gladiators’ public image triumph, were the Christians, facing awful deaths with

calm dignity. Armies of martyrs arose from bloody persecutions, and the more they laughed at death, as they were eaten by beasts or stabbed by warriors, the more powerful they became.

A ‘martyr pornography’ arose of naked flesh meeting swords, razor sharp claws and teeth. Distasteful to us, it achieved its aim of encouraging the faithful and ultimately overturned the old order. A Roman death became the death of Rome …

For further information go to www.toia.co.uk

i The Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College, Woodstock Road, 7.30 p.m. drinks reception, 8.00 p.m. lecture, on Thursday, 23rd February, 2017 Entry: Members £2, non-members £5, students under 30 free of charge.

Faithful unto Death by Herbert Schmalz

Female gladiators, Amazon and Achilia

Gladiator, 2000

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For further information go to www.toia.co.uk

THE ASHMOLEAN IN FOCUS

Dr Paul Roberts kindly spares some time out of his busy schedule to talk to TOIA. Paul recently curated the acclaimed Storms, War and Shipwrecks together with Dr Alexandra Sofroniew. The exhibition went on to show in Palermo.

Is there such a thing as a typical day in the life of a Keeper or Curator?The short answer is no. It’s wonderfully diverse and no two days are the same. There may be periods when a project is in progress and one can be incredibly focused during that short or long burst of time.

More typically, we undertake a whole range of roles besides curating exhibitions, encompassing research, fieldwork, storage, public engagement, gallery tours and teaching. It’s extraordinary that a curator’s teaching constitutes the equivalent of a half-time university teaching post.

At the core, we are here to look after and share the artefacts and collections and to leave them in a better state than we had found them.

What led you on the path to curatorship and keepership?As a kid, picking up willow-pattern fragments in the garden and rushing into the house shouting “Treasure!”. At 11, I was washing pots at a dig in Gloucester. My family was hugely supportive: trips to London (Tutankhamun) and also abroad to Athens, Rome, and Pompeii. My mum, Winifred Roberts, a butcher and then restaurateur, loved history and travel. Inspiration came from home and also a teacher who was an ex-Spitfire pilot and archaeologist.

After school, I studied at Cambridge gaining a 2:1 and, although I was rather

pleased, I was decidedly not encouraged to continue with a Doctorate by the Dons, so I went to live in Italy in Novara, near Milan, to teach English. My time in Italy has made a huge difference as I understand Italians and respect local customs; it has proved invaluable in curatorial work with Italian colleagues, as forging relationships determines how the project will go.

I thought my future would be in Italy, however on a dig there I met John Lloyd, the dig director, who encouraged me to do a doctorate at Sheffield. Having completed it, I took up a post at the British Museum.

I am lucky enough to do as a job what I was engaged in as a hobby and in retrospect they did me a huge favour back at Cambridge!

Which aspect of your job do you derive most satisfaction and joy from?Sharing the collections and exhibitions, lecturing and gallery talks and, most of all, seeing the public come in and their faces light up. Many people do not have ready access to culture and the in-built mission at the Ash is to share the collection through teaching and public engagement.

Where does the uniqueness of the Ashmolean lie?After 21 years at the British Museum, the Ashmolean is a bit different. It’s like the V&A, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum under one roof, amalgamated and appropriately scaled!

It is a museum of world status owing to the diversity of its collection and its teaching mission and it has the University at its

doorstep: a potent brew. It’s the only museum I would have left the British Museum for.

Apart from the venerable Ashmolean, which other museum do you most cherish and enjoy visiting?The British Museum. It’s not as old as the Ash, which is the oldest in the UK, but it is on a scale and level of excellence that few places can match. It’s my other home and a place that I love. I cannot lie!

Can you give us an indication of what might be on the horizon at The Ashmolean? In 2019 the museum will stage an exhibition entitled Feast focusing on Roman dining and exploring where the Romans got their culinary ideas from, principally the Greeks and the Etruscans. The first room will be dedicated to the Etruscans, long overdue as the last exhibition on the Etruscans here in the UK was in 1835.

Presently, I am helping to bring an exhibition to the Ashmolean on five of the world’s great faiths. Called Empires of Faith, it looks at how the structure and iconography of these great faiths crystallized in the first millennium A.D. Exhibits will range from archaeological artefacts to large sculptures, from beautiful, illustrated manuscripts to perishable, organic objects. In fact, I have just returned from Macedonia where I was examining terracotta plaques from the 5th-6th century depicting Archangel Michael and the True Cross.

It will be a fascinating show, reaching out to faith communities, with all religions cheek by jowl. A first for the Ashmolean, it will be marvellous.

THE UNSUNG HERO OF THE ITALIAN DIASPORATHE CASE OF GIACOMO LEONI, THE ARCHITECT BEHIND CLANDON PARK. SOME THOUGHTS BY JOHN WOODHOUSE, FORMER FIAT SERENA PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

The architect Giacomo Simone Leoni (Venice 1685 – London 1746), spent his working life in England, and left here a possible legacy of some twenty-five “Palladian” constructions, and, for English readers, the most splendid editions of the architectural writings of Palladio and Alberti. The main purpose of what follows is to provide a skeletal guide to Leoni’s surviving architectural masterpieces.

Little is known of his domestic life in London. He married an Englishwoman named Mary, and they had two sons, John Philip and Joseph. His working career of over thirty years in England may be traced from his designs for buildings of various kinds, from splendid mansions such as Lyme Park, and the delightful Wortley Hall, to more practical if still grand houses such as Alkrington Hall, or to smaller treasures such as the octagonal pavilion in the garden at Cliveden, now the chapel which houses the Astor tomb. Limits of space prevent full discussion here of his role in other buildings. This brief item may be regarded as a thumbnail sketch or guide to his life and career.

Giacomo Simone Leoni was born in Venice in 1685 in the modest parish of San Cassiano. La Serenissima was, at that time not only a favourite goal for English tourists but also the birthplace of Venetian artists seeking fame and fortune abroad.

Despite relatively humble beginnings, the young Leoni, fascinated by the beauty of Palladio’s architecture, was able to spend much of his adolescence travelling throughout Italy, funded by his indulgent paternal uncle Antonio. The young man studied classical architecture and Roman ruins as Leon Battista Alberti and Palladio had done in earlier centuries. He even utilised Palladio’s guide to ancient Rome, L’antichità di Roma, which Leoni himself reprinted in later years. Until 1708 Leoni also spent time with his paternal uncle in Düsseldorf, as part of that brilliant diaspora of artistic talents which had spread Venetian culture throughout Europe. A Venetian workforce was re-building Bensberg Castle for Joseph Wilhelm, Count Palatine of the Rhine. Reduced now to the status of luxury hotel the Althoff Grandhotel Schloss Bensberg, in Bergisch-Gladbach near Cologne, the imposing building is still visitable. At Düsseldorf Leoni began a rough version

of a translation of Palladio’s Quattro libri dell’architettura. He also gained practical lessons on building techniques.

Leoni arrived in England about 1713, hoping to find a patron, and by 1715 had received a potential commission from Henry Grey, Duke of Kent, former “Grand Tourist”, and enthusiastic Italophile. At the noble lord’s request, Leoni undertook to design the reconstruction of the Grey family mansion at Wrest Park, and by 1715 his plans were ready. The premature deaths of Duke Henry’s two sons and heirs, followed by financial losses (as a result of the Duke’s disastrous investment in the South Sea Company) scotched the scheme and ruined Leoni’s hopes. Those 1715 blueprints still reside amongst Duke Henry’s correspondence conserved in Bedfordshire and Luton Archives. Wrest Park was not renovated until 1833 (and then in French style by Thomas 2nd Earl de Grey). Leoni’s life was to be punctuated by similar crises and disasters.

For further information go to www.toia.co.uk

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Bensberg Castle, near Cologne

The Octagonal Pavilion, Clivedon

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

But Leoni was not one to fall at the first hurdle. The times were auspicious, Palladian architecture was all the rage, and there were keen patrons infatuated by their sometimes errant concept of the new fashion. Leoni turned his hand, meanwhile, to demonstrating his familiarity with Italian Renaissance architecture. Unlike his less fortunate English contemporaries, he was able, thanks to his innate knowledge of Italian, to pioneer and publish luxurious English translations of the influential works on architecture of both Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) and Andrea Palladio (1505-55). For a decade between 1716 and 1726, Leoni concentrated his efforts on the production of his eye-catching editions of their treatises. The volumes also contained Leoni’s exquisite prints of his own and his predecessors’ work. He added scholarly introductions, notes and observations on past and current techniques, providing authentic information about Palladian style buildings, though regrettably his remarks were ignored by students of architecture, both then and now.

Leoni, in whole or in part, was responsible for some 25 buildings in England. In 1995 one of his finest, Lyme Park in Cheshire, the Legh family mansion, became renowned for its role in the television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, where it starred as Pemberley, the home of the noble Darcy family, famously providing the scene for Darcy/Colin Firth’s plunge into the lake, prior to emerging wet-shirted before Elizabeth Bennet. A mention of this frivolity is a swift way of connecting popular drama with Leoni’s work, since few of the millions of viewers knew or know the name of Lyme Park’s builder. In a similar allusion to Leoni’s mansions, Clandon Park in 2008 had its modern reputation enhanced by its role in the drama, The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley. Tragedy struck in 2015 (ironically the third centenary of the discarded plans for Wrest Park), when Clandon Park was destroyed by fire. At least the conflagration provided a brief excuse to recall Leoni’s name when in a fine article in The Times (30 April 2015), Simon Jenkins regretted “the destruction of Giacomo Leoni’s masterpiece”, and there enlarged upon its fine architectural merits.

Experts have found it difficult to assign Leoni’s claims to some of these buildings.

They depend for authentication on the plans and engravings which Leoni included in his editions of Palladio and Alberti, as well as on fragile or brief correspondence with his patrons, comments written on some of his manuscripts, and hints by his contemporaries, but no contractual documents. As a Catholic Leoni was disqualified from bidding for public works, and in a political climate of Whigs and Protestants, particularly after 1714 and the

accession of George I, this prevented many commissions and complex contracts. The work he did seems to have been rewarded with “a present”, not a profitable contract.

Here, for interest, are the better or more obvious examples of his work. He constructed possibly the first London town houses (Leoni called them his “small houses in town”), the first in the garden of Burlington House, at 7, Burlington Gardens (at present a fashion outlet).

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Lyme Park

Clandon Park after the fire

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Another smaller house was Argyle House in King’s Rd, Chelsea, and a third, Lord Shannon’s House, at 21 Arlington Street. Among the great houses he designed, apart from the above-mentioned at Clandon and Lyme, Moor Park, at Rickmansworth, is now an up-market golf club, and periodically used for film work, Thorndon Hall, in Essex became another golf club and in part apartments. Wortley Manor at Wortley near Sheffield, has a pretty south front and by good fortune, although destined for destruction in 1950, it was bought by local Labour and Co-operative trade unions and converted into an interesting and reasonably priced hotel now open to the general public. Alkrington Hall, in Middleton, Lancashire, built for Sir Darcy Lever, stands alone on its height, surrounded by suburbia. Leoni’s plans for a re-building of Cliveden, Buckinghamshire, failed in the competition, but he did construct the Blenheim Gate, an elaborate bower in the garden there, and a small, but beautiful, garden pavilion which now serves as the (Waldorf) Astor memorial tomb. Carshalton Park, Sutton, was another blow for Leoni’s ambitions. Sir William Scawen, ex-governor of the Bank of England had commissioned Leoni to build a new mansion at Carshalton and had allegedly set aside ten thousand pounds for the purpose. Unfortunately William died before the foundations were laid and the family fortune, perhaps mismanaged by his nephew, Thomas, was dissipated, along with Leoni’s hopes. Ironically several of Leoni’s premier buildings, including Bold Hall, Burton Park, and Lathom House

were destroyed, accidentally, by fire, or by industrial development.

Some afterthoughts: The rather gloomy Piggot Monument in Quainton Church (post-1735), Buckinghamshire, is the nearest example to Oxford of Leoni’s work. It has a parallel in his funerary monument to Daniel Pulteney in the east cloister of Westminster Abbey, where the reading figure itself was carved by one of Leoni’s old collaborators, Michael Rysbrack, whose fireplaces in Clandon’s marble hall are rather more splendid. Another curiosity is Leoni’s dedication to Lord Burlington of his beautiful etching of Vitruvius’s Egyptian Hall, in volume three of his 1729 edition of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria. This was used by Burlington as his own plan for the Assembly Rooms in Blake Street, York, now an Italian restaurant.

Critics have wondered why Leoni’s designs seemed to lack the enormous variety of Palladio’s buildings. But it must be remembered that Giacomo was offering the English gentry what they thought, often mistakenly, was fashionable Palladian architecture. To have inserted more of Palladio’s variety into his offerings might not have been so saleable.

Recent critics have seen the influence of Leoni’s Palladio volumes, in Thomas Jefferson’s construction of his mansion at Monticello, notably Leoni’s design for Palladio’s Rotunda, built “sopra un monticello”, as well as Leoni’s suggestion of the Pantheon as a model for the spherical in architectural design. The two ideas

combined led to aspects of the architecture of Jefferson’s University of Virginia, while his political power might also have influenced the design of Washington’s Capitol, and so the design of most North American town halls. English critics have pointed to the clear if superficial parallel between Aston-Webb’s ponderous 1912 facade to Buckingham Palace, and the west front of Lyme Park.

Leoni’s own preparation for progressing in his enterprises was usually assiduous, but the illness or misfortune of his patrons at crucial times often ruined his plans. To crown his misfortune, despite the rich patrons for whom he worked at one time or another, his remuneration continued to be regarded by them as a “present”, and when Giacomo died in abject poverty in 1746, he was helped during his last month of life by a charitable gift of eight guineas from his last employer, Lord Fitzwalter. He was buried in Old St Pancras Churchyard, intestate, and leaving his widow, Mary and his two sons. In 1854 the burials were removed by the Midland Railway to lay the main line of the new St Pancras station. The names of the more illustrious dead were saved and commemorated on a memorial stele set up in 1877 by Angela Burdett Coutts. This contains the names of other notables once buried there, including J.C.Bach, Mary Wolstonecraft, John Flaxman, Sir John Sloane, and James Leoni, perhaps the most public appreciation of his brilliant but tragic life and career.

For further information go to www.toia.co.uk

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Thorndon Hall

Old St. Pancras Churchyard

Weekly Classes in Oxford

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January 2017

April 2017

Day & Weekend Events• An Introduction to European Film

• Artists and Patrons of Renaissance Europe

• Decline and Fall: The Western Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries

• Gothic Yielding to Renaissance: Architectural Transition in Italy

• Greek Culture in the Roman World

• Isabella d’Este and the Art of the Italian Renaissance Courts: 1450-1550

• Language & History

• Language Teaching: Essential Techniques

• Plato’s Atlantis

• Puccini and his Women

Join us for a day or weekend to listen to some of the world’s leading experts on a wide range of subjects:

• Magna Graecia and South Italian Architecture: from Roman Empire to Risorgimento

• Modernism in European Art

• Power and People in Imperial Rome

• The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century: In Thrall to Italy

• Ways of Seeing Sicily

• Six Masterpieces of Italian Art & Architecture, 6 lectures, 26 January – 2 March

• Roman Judea, 6 lectures, 27 January – 3 March

• An Introduction to Teaching Grammar, 4 February

• An Introduction to Dante’s Paradiso, 11 March

• Eternal Bronze, Essential Stone: Sculpture, Symbolism and Modernism from Rodin to Giacometti, 1 April

• Introduction to Semantics: How Language Makes Sense, 22 April

• Language and Identity, 13 May

• Language in Use, 27 May

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3 double bedrooms, 3 showers, 1 bathroom, garden, BBQ. Peaceful setting in chestnut groves with stunning views of the nearby medieval hilltop village of Roccatederighi, within walking distance and boasting 5 restaurants and a wide range of services. About 1 1/2 hours from Pisa airport and 35 minutes from the coast with miles of public beaches and pine groves. £500 – £750 p/w depending on timing and numbers. Contact 0775 143 4267 or david@haenlein.co.uk

BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY HOUSE IN SOUTHERN TUSCANY, MAREMMA

GARDEN APARTMENT IN THE BEAUTY AND TRANQUILLITY OF THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE

Two-bedroom furnished apartment (sleeps 5) with own patio, garden and garage. Fully equipped modern kitchen. One of two dwellings in a 4-hectare ruralproperty in Bracciano Regional Park, yet close (50 km) to Rome. Ideal for relaxation, sports and visits to Lake Bracciano, or the many delightful nearby places of interest: Tarquinia, Bracciano, Viterbo, Trevignano, Terme di Stigliano, Sutri and, of course, Rome itself.

Available throughout the year: weekend (from £240), weekly (from £400) or monthly (from £900).

For further information and photos, please go to: www.casadellaluna.com

The natural beauty of the medieval town of Taormina is hard to dispute. The view of the sea and Mount Etna from its jagged cactus-covered cliffs is as close to perfection as a panorama can get, particularly on clear days when the snow-capped volcano’s white puffs of smoke rise against the cobalt blue sky. Villa Britannia is a centrally-located small and exclusive boutique B&B, ideal for those with a love of food and wine, as well as those wishing to discover the multifarious cultural heritage of Taormina and Sicily more widely. Enjoy local cooking classes with Louisa, Etna wine tasting and traditional Sicilian bread making and much more. For further details and special events, see: www.villabritannia.com

EXPERIENCE SICILY: STAY – COOK – CREATE AT A CHARMING BOUTIQUE B&B IN TAORMINA

Family apartment, Dorsoduro. Sleeps up to eight – 3 doubles, 2 singles, 2 bathrooms, and terrace for meals. To rent for one week minimum or more.

Contact Margaret Pianta on 01494 873975 or via email: pianta@btopenworld.com

VENETIAN CHARMS IN DORSODURO

2-bedroom, 1-bathroom flat, within a family-owned villa in Alassio, zona Paradiso, 10 minutes’ walk from the beach and the centre of town. Alassio hosts an English library with over 20,000 volumes, a legacy from the past, and the Hanbury Tennis Club, a real gem, which contains some legacy memorabilia, ideal for tennis fans and anyone interested in playing tennis whilst on holiday. For further information and availability, contact Rupert Parmenter 00 39 331 6139126 or email rupert.parmenter@yahoo.com

THE ITALIAN RIVERIA AND ALASSIO’S FASCINATING PAST: FLAT TO RENT

Set in 5 acres of olive, almond, fig and fruit trees, this simple but elegant casa, with attractively vaulted ceilings, offers the following spacious accommodation:

• 2 double bedrooms in main house, additional double bedroom in annex, all with ensuite shower rooms

• A comfortable entrance hall/sitting room

• A fully equipped kitchen-cum-dining room with double French doors leading to a large patio offering plenty of seating, an outside dining room and built-in barbeque

There is a good sized swimming pool (13 x 4.5m) with electric cover and private surrounds.

This rural retreat is 7 minutes’ drive from the historic town of Ceglie Messapica, one of the oldest towns in Puglia, and near to the popular towns of Ostuni and Martina Franca. Ceglie has been identified as the gastronomic centre of Puglia and boasts many excellent restaurants.

For further information contact 07818 452405 or nikki@opvl.co.uk

RURAL RETREAT IN 5 ACRES OF OLIVE GROVE, PUGLIA

ITALIAN COOKERY CLASSRISOTTO AND LEMON SCALOPPINE

Tutor: Carla Colombani SkinnerVenue: The Marlborough School, Shipton Road, Woodstock, OxfordshireSaturday 4 March 10:00 - 16:00 £39.00 + ingredients

This course is for confident beginners. Both risotto and scaloppine are two extremely versatile Italian dishes. You will learn how to prepare and cook a traditional risotto, which is the base for a range of other delicious risotto dishes (for example,

with mushrooms, cheese, asparagus, or saffron etc.) Scaloppine (meaning a thinly sliced cut of meat) are also extremely versatile. The tutor will provide a chicken breast per student, arborio or other suitable Italian rice, butter, sea salt and pepper and expects the cost to be around £3. A list will be given of additional ingredients and equipment that need to be brought along on the day. The school has a modern kitchen and every student will be allocated their own cooker/hob and working surface.For further information see: www.marlborough.oxon.sch.uk/776/cookery

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LA SETTIMANA DEL BARATTO

VISITORS TO ITALY CAN STAY FOR FREE BY SHARING SKILLS AND GOODS

Thousands of B&Bs in Italy are offering stays in exchange for services and skills ranging from social media to live music, DIY to olive picking. Adventurous travellers could bag themselves a free holiday in Italy thanks to an initiative that facilitates bartering between bed and breakfast hosts and their guests.

La Settimana del Baratto – or Barter Week – encourages travellers to exchange goods and services for a free stay in thousands of Italian B&Bs.

To take part, prospective guests can list what they have to offer on the Barter Week site. Alternatively, guests can browse the wish-list of B&Bs and contact them to negotiate their stay. Some hosts, for example, will let you stay in exchange for quality local produce from your home region or country. Others will give you a room in exchange for a live musical performance, while many are bartering for some help with the business – from translating the website or conducting a photo shoot to painting the shutters or doing some gardening.

Although Barter Week fosters a large number of exchanges, some B&Bs accept barters all year round. These can be found on the barattobb.it site, which lists about 1,000 places to stay.

TOIA is an Oxford-based cultural association for those interested in any aspect of Italy and its culture in the broadest sense: language, art and architecture, travel, politics, history, literature, music, food and wine, or other. No knowledge of Italian is required to enjoy its diverse programme of events. The annual subscription is £15 renewable each November (£23 for couples, £6 for students under 30, and £6 for members living more than 40 miles from Oxford). Further information, with an application form, is available from the Membership Secretary or downloadable from our website: www.toia.co.uk. The TOIA Magazine is published three times a year. Members and non-members alike are welcome to attend our events; membership brings with it benefits of reduced entry charges, a termly copy of the magazine and you will be supporting a non-profit organisation promoting all things Italian.

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We are delighted to announce that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and CNH Industrial have generously agreed to sponsor your new-look TOIA Magazine.

WHO WE ARE:

CHAIR: Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford OX1 4AU Email: martin.mclaughlin@magd.ox.ac.uk

VICE-CHAIR: Dott.ssa. Luciana John, 6 Chalfont Road, Oxford OX2 6TH Email: lrjohn@yahoo.co.uk

SECRETARY: Spencer Gray,Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DPEmail: toiasecretary@outlook.com

TREASURER & CURATOR OF THE ROWE TRUST: Dott.ssa. Luciana John, 6 Chalfont Road, Oxford OX2 6TH Email: lrjohn@yahoo.co.uk

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TOIA Events: at a glance23 JANUARY Film, Fuocoammare,

Lecture Theatre, Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square, 7.30 p.m.

31 JANUARY Lecture, Botticelli Reimagined, Dr Ana Debenedetti, The Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre, St. Anne’s College,

7.30 for 8.00 p.m.

9 FEBRUARY The Dorothy Rowe Memorial Lecture, Cesare Beccaria and his Context, Professor Renato Pasta, The Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College, 5.00 p.m.

15 FEBRUARY Lecture, Hannah Kinney and Ben Kehoe, Blue Boar Lecture Theatre, Christ Church, 7.30 for 8.00 p.m.

23 FEBRUARY Lecture, The Roman Art of Dying, Dr Paul Roberts, The Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre, St. Anne’s College, 7.30 for 8.00 p.m.

Special preview: TOIA events forthcoming in the Trinity Term, Gavin Hewitt (Chief Correspondent, BBC), 11th May, and internationally acclaimed author Simonetta Agnello Hornby, 23rd May.

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