Previous Research Seminars

29 September 2022

Crafting Medieval Spain: the Torrijos Ceilings in the Global Museum

Dr Anna McSweeney - History Of Art, TCD
Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen - V&A Museum, London

This talk will introduce the new collaborative project between Dr Anna McSweeney (History of Art, TCD) and Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen (V&A Museum, London), entitled Crafting Medieval Spain.

This interdisciplinary project financed by the British Academy and the Trinity College Dublin, focuses on four monumental wooden ceilings from the Torrijos palace, near Toledo. These ceilings were created in the 1490s by craftsmen working with Islamic techniques and styles, demonstrating how Islamic artistic features were assimilated to a new ‘Gothic’ taste in late medieval Spain. Dispersed in the early 20th century, the ceilings are now in museums in London, Madrid, the Loire and San Francisco.

Taking advantage of plans to redisplay the London ceiling at the new branch of the V&A East in Stratford, East London, the project has brought together an interdisciplinary and international group of experts to ask questions about materials, craftsmanship patronage and dispersal of the ceilings. Through a series of workshops, site visits and academic and public engagement events, this project offers an opportunity to rethink the legacy of Islamic art in Europe.  We will introduce the scope, potential and aims of the project, outline our initial findings and discuss our strategies for reaching audiences beyond the academy. 

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Crafting Medieval Spain: the Torrijos Ceiling in the global museum

13 October 2022

Form Follows Fever: Malaria, Architecture, and the Building of Hong Kong

Dr Chris Cowell - History of Art TCD

Dr Christopher Cowell explores, in his new book, the relatively obscure and precarious history of the first colonizing of Hong Kong Island across the 1840s and the building of its city of Victoria. During this period, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location. Malaria intermittently carried off settlers by the hundreds. Architecture, cartography, and urbanism, here, will be shown to offer us a crucial forensic lens through which to examine the ideologies of public health and space, race and placemaking, and commerce and politics. Across this period, the colony radically altered—from linear city to climbing city—in desperate response to a belief in the disease as gaseous and airborne.

10 November 2022

Before the New World: Roman Printmaking and the Spanish Empire, 1492- 1651

Dr Emily Monty - Fagel Collection Visiting Research Fellow, TCD

This seminar will focus on my doctoral dissertation about Spanish-related printmaking in early modern Rome and the process through which I am developing this research into a book. Spain outsourced much of its pictorial printing in the early modern period, and Roman publishers focused increasingly on the growing market of Spanish buyers, settled locally and reachable through international networks. While cardinals, popes, and princes clamoured for images and artefacts about the far reaches of the Spanish Empire and its newly conquered peoples, Roman publishing houses appealed to the print-buying public with more local—in many ways conservative—subjects, including anatomy, street fights, religious festivals, and saints’ lives. Such pictorial prints and illustrated books comprise a very different picture of the Spanish Empire than the images of cannibals and natural wonders from the so-called New World that proliferated in northern Europe. Analysing a variety of Roman publications, I assert that these images, too, are central to the construction of Spanish identity in the early modern world.

24 November 2022

The Belgian Friendship Building: From New York’s Flushing Meadow to Richmond’s Virginia Union University

Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty - School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD

Built for the World’s Fair held in 1939 and 1940 in New York city’s Flushing Meadow and designed by Henry van de Velde in collaboration with Victor Bourgeois and Léon Stynen, the Belgian Building was subsequently re-erected on the grounds of Virginia Union University, a historically Black institution in Richmond, Virginia, with a strong history of training African Americans professionals dedicated to advancing the cause of civil rights. The first major example of European modernism placed on a campus in the United States and a firm challenge to the city’s history of commemorating Confederate generals who fought to uphold slavery, the building could be seen as an overlooked milestone in the history of the architecture of the African American community, a status that is undercut, however, by its relationship to Belgium’s colonial ties to the Congo.

10 February 2022

Dr Catherine Yvard           Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Fragmented Illuminations: Medieval and Renaissance Cuttings at the Victoria & Albert Museum

With over 2000 cuttings from medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, the V&A holds one of the largest collections of this kind in the world. On the occasion of the Fragmented Illuminations exhibition at the V&A (until 8 May 2022), curator Catherine Yvard will explore the history of this collection, and highlight some of the exciting discoveries made while researching for the exhibition.
  
Join Zoom Meeting @ 5 pm
https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/94638758136?pwd=WU1USFdQZ2VScGQ3QldyeGxVZklWdz09
Meeting ID: 946 3875 8136                 Passcode: 448679

24 February 2022

Professor Lynda Mulvin       University College Dublin

James Cavanah Murphy (1760–1814): Pioneering Architect of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Professor Lynda Mulvin explores the work of Irish architect, architectural draughtsman, and author James Cavanah Murphy, overlooked as one of the great pioneers of architecture and design of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His architectural drawings of the Iberian peninsula were a major source for the Gothic and Moorish Revival styles providing a new font of architectural detail, ornament, and inscriptions for early nineteenth century architects, antiquarians, and designers.
Join Zoom Meeting @ 5 pm
https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/94406089394?pwd=VDQ3N0xZdWVITXdrUHkvWURKa3JxUT09
Meeting ID: 944 0608 9394                 Passcode: 052129

24 March 2022

Dr Anna McSweeney (TCD) and Dr Mariam Rosser-Owen (V&A)

Crafting Medieval Spain: The Torrijos Ceilings in the Global Museum

Drs Anna McSweeney and Mariam Rosser-Owen will present their work in a new collaborative project which focuses on four monumental wooden ceilings from the Torrijos Palace near Toledo. Created in the 1490s by craftsmen employing Islamic techniques and styles, the talk demonstrates how these features were assimilated into ‘Gothic’ taste in late medieval Spain. The ceilings were dispersed across the world in the early 20th Century. One ceiling, to be redisplayed at the V&A East Stratford has provided the opportunity for an interdisciplinary and international group of experts to re-evaluate its importance against the legacy of Islamic art in Europe and its appeal to a wider contemporary audience.

Join Zoom Meeting @ 5 pm
https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/93549829419?pwd=WWx4V2ZCMXp1VFl3WWg3a0l4ZFhiUT09
Meeting ID: 935 4982 9419                 Passcode: 824389

7 April 2022

Hannah Baker       PhD candidate, Art & Architectural History, TCD

‘Mildly Deranged’:
Sarah Cecilia Harrison, the Lane Bequest, and Her Legacy

Sarah Cecilia Harrison (1863–1941) was one of Ireland’s foremost portrait painters and social reformers by the beginning of the twentieth century, becoming the first female city councillor for Dublin in 1912. Why, then, is so little known about her life, and why is she largely absent in Irish historiography? Why when mentioned has she often been dismissed in disparaging terms such as ‘mildly deranged’? Hannah Baker examines Harrison’s influence and her relations with leading figures in Ireland’s art community such as Sir Hugh Lane, exploring her influence upon his controversial art bequest and her own legacy.

Join Zoom Meeting @ 5 pm
https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/92816691974?pwd=QjlKR2hJRjZ5cU5FR2lZcFo2K2oyQT09
Meeting ID: 928 1669 1974                 Passcode: 005799

14 April 2022

Megan Brien    PhD candidate, Art & Architectural History, TCD

Asylum Endurance:
The Psychiatric Hospital Interior in Twentieth-Century Ireland

Asylum architecture casts a long shadow over twentieth-century psychiatric hospitals in Ireland, as issues of power, history, and privilege are embedded in these sites. Analysis of the interior of St Brendan’s Hospital, Grangegorman, provides opportunity to understand changing approaches to care that otherwise were not immediately or evenly reflected in the psychiatric hospital’s architecture. Megan Brien will show how visual, discourse, and spatial analysis can uncover a history of the lived interior of St Brendan’s Hospital.

Join Zoom Meeting @ 5 pm
https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/95417123735?pwd=YVl0Y1dTelBISWNWRkwzaVg1NmEzZz09
Meeting ID: 954 1712 3735                 Passcode: 148878

Wednesday, 14th October, 17.30 Arts Building, Rm: 5083B

Ruins in Ireland, Ireland in Ruins

Dr Yvonne Scott,
Dept of the History of Art and Architecture, TCD

Mention of paintings of ruins in the Irish landscape automatically suggests artworks carried out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, generally of classical or medieval remains, or ‘gothick’ follies. But what of ruins in Modern and contemporary imagery? What patterns if any are evident there? Do they reprise traditional meanings or do new interpretations emerge in response to events and circumstances current at the time they were created?

Wednesday, 28th October, 17.30 Arts Building, Rm: 5083B

The Tipperary Rembrandt

Dr Philip McEvansoneya
Dept of the History of Art and Architecture, TCD

In the course of the nineteenth century a number of works attributed to Rembrandt were to be found in Ireland. These were not only the optimistically attributed lots handled by auctioneers but also the works lent from private collections to public events in the sincere, if often mistaken, belief that they were genuine. However, the vast majority of such works have disappeared but one survives and has been traced, making it a prime specimen for studying questions of attribution and provenance.

Wednesday, 25th November, Arts building, Rm: 5083B

Irish Monasteries and Collective Memory

Dr Rachel Moss,
Dept of the History of Art and Architecture, TCD

The Irish landscape is dotted with the remains of monastic houses that provide an evocative reminder of the medieval past. The remarkable preservation often of specific parts of buildings, is far from accidental. Focusing particularly on the preservation of urban monastic houses, this seminar will examine how collective community memory during the early modern period impacted on the manner in which redundant friaries and priories were preserved and re-used, and what this tells us about attitudes to the medieval past in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland.

Wednesday, 9th December, Arts Building, Rm: 5083B

Faces in the Crowd: Images of People in Ireland, c.1800-30

Dr Mary Jane Boland,
Lecturer in Irish Art History, History of Art Dept, UCC
[Graduate of MPhil in Irish Art History, TCD]

Images of Irish people gathered in crowds became an increasingly ubiquitous feature of artistic output in Ireland during the early decades of the nineteenth century. This seminar will interrogate such images, particularly looking at scenes depicting rural villages, city parades and religious ritual, and question their attraction to urban audiences. Why did elite patrons of the arts want to decorate their homes with pictures of wakes or rural markets? What can this aesthetic tell us about early-­‐nineteenth-­‐century national-­‐identity building and civic pride? The aim of this seminar is to find out!