SIENA: WALLS OF GOLD

Hilary Hope Guise, professor of art history, Florida State University, United States of America

Tuesday 27 January 1.00 pm COURSE FEES R115; Staff and students R58

Siena, established in 1225, was a republic for over four hundred years. This enabled it to become one of the most powerful economic and cultural cities in Europe in the Middle Ages. Siena was run by an oligarchy led by nine mercantile bankers, which enabled the city to attract great wealth and gain stability. The culture of Siena, with its apparently limitless resources of gold and precious pigments, oozed an almost Near Eastern opulence. Siena benefited directly from the disaster of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. With the sacking of Constantinople, Constantine’s own city, and the ravaging of the churches – including Hagia Sophia – the artisans and the Greek icon painters fled to Italy, taking their skills and their iconographic traditions with them. The work of these artisans and icon painters inspired the panels of Duccio, the Di Cione brothers, the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini. These works have never been equalled for their refinement and the solemnity of their messages.

In this lecture we will explore the intense gilded beauty of these precious objects of veneration that have survived for almost eight hundred years, carrying with them the calm and ethereal, other-worldly spirit of a faith rising to its zenith, expressed in a silent language of reflection and contemplation.

TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/performance.aspx?itemid=1575235241

Hilary Guise

Hilary Hope Guise lectures for Florida State University on the London campus and has taught for other universities in USA, France and UK including Cambridge. She is also a  passionate Classicist. After a life-time of touring in the USA, Europe and Australasia and the all over the UK she now spends more time as a practising artist in her studio on London City Island on the Thames.  Her work can be seen on her website: www.hilaryguise.com  via which you can also send a message to follow up on lectures.