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Arts Society

St Bees Arts Society holds regular lecture meetings with a wide range of well known speakers on Art and Art History.

Annual subscription £25 single session £6.50 & students £1.

All most welcome.

Wednesday 23rd September
2009

Michelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling

Ross King

In 1508, despite strong advice to the contrary, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel in Rome. Four years earlier, at the age of twenty-nine, Michelangelo had unveiled his masterful statue of David in Florence; however, he had little experience as a painter, even less working in the delicate medium of fresco, and none with the curved surface of vaults, which dominated the chapel's ceiling. The temperamental Michelangelo was himself reluctant, and he stormed away from Rome, risking Julius's wrath, only to be persuaded to eventually begin.
Michelangelo would spend the next four years labouring over the vast ceiling. Ross King's fascinating lecture tells the story of those four extraordinary years. Battling against ill health, financial difficulties, domestic problems, inadequate knowledge of the art of fresco, and the pope's impatience, Michelangelo created figures depicting the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood so beautiful that, when they were unveiled in 1512, they stunned his onlookers. While he worked, Rome teemed around him, its politics and rivalries with other city-states and with France at fever pitch, often intruding on his work. From Michelangelo's experiments with the composition of pigment and plaster to his bitter competition with the famed painter Raphael, who was working on the neighboring Papal Apartments, Ross King presents a magnificent tapestry of day-to-day life on the ingenious Sistine scaffolding and outside in the upheaval of early-sixteenth-century Rome.

Wednesday November 25th 2009

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know
Dr Suzanne May

One of the most enduring ideas in the popular imagination is that of the eccentric creative genius.  We still think of artists in very Romantic terms, as moody, self-absorbed, shaggy and highly libidinous libertines.  The image of the artist has been formed through biographies, autobiographies, self-portraits and, in recent years, the biopic.  Obviously, such sources are subject to the most blatant kinds of bias and mythologizing, but are all too often taken as firm fact.  Modern science is only just beginning to explore the biological basis for ‘genius’ and any accompanying behavioural traits.  Sigmund Freud’s controversial psychoanalytical approach to Leonardo has been largely discounted.  While the sciences may not be able to determine definitively whether or not there is an inherent personality that comes with artistic genius we can nonetheless see clearly how many of the notions and myths about eccentricity began and how they continue to  be  entertained. In the sixteenth century Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists created the image of the Divine Michelangelo, an otherworldly melancholic, and set a template for those aspiring to the highest forms of artistic success.  Yet Vasari’s stories were based on tales from antiquity, from medieval hagiographies, and from the carefully contrived anecdotes of Michelangelo himself.  What is undisputable is that, for many reasons, artists have historically been granted a special place in society and have been given the privilege to indulge and display the most unconventional behaviour.

Wednesday January 27th
2010

Comments on Contemporary Architecture
Especially glass buildings

Kati Blom

Kati Blom teaches at Newcastle University School of Architecture and is writing her PhD thesis on glass buildings. She has promised to show us images of exciting modern architecture and talk to us about them.

Wednesday March 24th
2010

Dumfries House
A work in progress

Charlotte  Rostek

Wednesday April 28th
2010

The Art of Exploration

Charmian Robson

The exploration of the rest of the world by Europeans began in earnest in  the mid fifteenth century when need coincided with adequate ships and  adequate navigational technology . This lecture will involve an outline history of exploration and a look at what the explorers saw, and depicted, and what they brought back and others painted.

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