Donatello: the greatest of them all
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Tuesday 14 January 2020
(6 pm) - The Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AT
- Lecturer: Jim Harris
Is it possible to say that one artist is ‘better’ than another?
And amongst the best of the best, is there still a hierarchy of greatness?
Should art historians be carefully neutral, maintaining a stern critical distance from grubby subjective questions of comparative ‘quality’ across time, media and geography?
Michelangelo, Leonardo and Rembrandt are among the regular contenders for the artistic Heavyweight Championship of the World but in this lecture, Dr Jim Harris of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology takes an unashamedly partisan stance to argue that, of all of them, the fifteenth-century Florentine sculptor Donatello is the undefeated title-holder.
Seconds out, please…
Lecturer
Dr Jim Harris is an art historian, focusing on the sculpture of late-medieval and early-Renaissance Europe. His primary interests lie in sculptural materials and techniques, and especially in the question of how three-dimensional surfaces are transformed by polychromy, the addition of paint, gold and inlays, and by the subsequent, successive alterations, deliberate or by chance, that theyundergo during their lifetimes. He has an extensive involvement across various university disciplines. Jim trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and as an art historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he wrote his PhD thesis on the polychrome sculpture of Donatello, under the supervision of Professor Patricia Rubin. He subsequently held the Courtauld’s Andrew W Mellon Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Caroline Villers Research Fellowship in Conservation. He is the Ashmolean Museum’s Teaching Curator, leading the academic engagement programmes across the curriculum of the University of Oxford, a post originally established by a grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and now generously supported by the Barrie A and Deedee Wigmore Foundation.
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