The Seattle Art Museum to host Lectures on Calder and Michelangelo

Written by Diane Hornig Thursday, 31 December 2009 21:01

SEATTLE, WA.- It’s not too late for visitors to the Seattle Art Museum to get to know its two special exhibitions in unique depth. Engaging talks by some of the most respected experts on Alexander Calder and Michelangelo will reveal new information about these behemoths of the art world during lectures on January 14 and January 15, 2010, in conjunction with the exhibitions Alexander Calder: A Balancing Act and Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings for the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti.

JANUARY 14, 7-8 PM
TWO ARTISTS: ALEXANDER CALDER AND HERBERT MATTER with Jessica Holmes, deputy director of the Calder Foundation
During this lecture, Jessica Holmes, deputy director of the Calder Foundation, discusses the long and inspired friendship between Alexander Calder and Herbert Matter. Shortly after his arrival in the United States, photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter gained the confidence of sculptor Alexander Calder. Matter would make the most complete photographic record of Calder during the critical early years of his artistic development.

JANUARY 15, 2010, 7–8 PM
WILLIAM E. WALLACE PRESENTS “MICHELANGELO: THE ARTIST AND THE ARISTOCRAT”

Do we really need a new biography of Michelangelo? Is there anything left to say? William E. Wallace speaks about the challenges and excitement of writing a modern biography of the famous Renaissance artist. Wallace offers a substantially new view of the artist, who was not only a great sculptor, painter, architect and poet but also an aristocrat who believed in the ancient and noble origins of his family. William E. Wallace is a professor Renaissance art and architecture at Washington University in Saint Louis and an internationally recognized authority on Michelangelo. In addition to more than eighty essays, chapters and articles, he is the author and editor of four different books on Michelangelo. His latest book, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times, was published in October 2009. A book signing will follow the lecture.

Visiting the museum of the Casa Buonarroti arouses, first of all, the emotion of admiration for several early works by Michelangelo contained within its walls. These very famous works by Michelangelo of extreme artistic importance include the "Madonna of the Stairs" and the "Battle of the Centaurs". But for those who pass through the main entrance of the lovely seventeenth century building located at Via Ghibellina 70, Florence, it is even more interesting to relate the Michelangelo masterpieces housed there with the long story of the Buonarroti family. The family did all it could to enlarge the dwelling and make it more attractive, while preserving a precious cultural heredity and assembling a precious art collection at the same time.

Not only do the well-known masterworks by Michelangelo kept in the Casa Buonarroti come from the family patrimony; the same is also true of paintings, sculptures, majolicas and the archaeological sections arranged on the museum's two floors. Thus, the significance of the Casa Buonarroti does not limit itself to the exaltation of an extraordinary personage such as Michelangelo, even if the existing documentation on him has been enriched by gifts added to the family inheritance and by pieces on loan from Florentine museums.

The idea of creating a magnificent building decorated by renowned artists in the name of family honor, above all that of its illustrious ancestors, was conceived in 1612 by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, that exceptional man of letters and cultural promoter, who achieved his dream with a thirty-year time span. The Casa Buonarroti has remained unchanged down three centuries of vicissitudes, with moments of decline alternating with moments of rebirth. It is the same now as it was then, a model residence among the many lost in Florence, one that exudes a secret and peculiar fascination bound up with the family history.

Visit museum of the Casa Buonarroti at : www.casabuonarroti.it/english/e-home.htm

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