The surviving polychromy of a second century Roman marble sculpture at the British Museum (BM SC 1597), also known as the Treu Head, was investigated scientifically and rigorously compared to other Greek and Roman works of art. The analysis showed very close similarities between the paint layers of the Treu Head and those of contemporaneous, highly naturalistic mummy portraits from Egypt.

The extremely limited extent of surviving paint on the head and the highly sophisticated painting technique make the reconstruction of the original polychromy a task fraught with difficulties. With the intentional aim of excluding a modern reinterpretation of ancient painting techniques, the colour reconstruction proposed here was created by digitally ‘transplanting’ images of face parts from original Roman mummy portraits onto the Treu Head. The digital transplant involved reshaping the different facial features of the mummy portraits to those of the Treu Head. The novelty of this colour reconstruction lies not only on the thorough scientific reliability of the data, but also on the use of only Roman painted objects.

The final appearance of the head is therefore not intended as a definitive reconstruction of the ‘original’ appearance, but as a ‘possible’ appearance.

Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths University, Joan Anim-Addo brings us her voice on Black Women’s Writing and the place of the Black figure in the Humanities. This event will be hosted in connection with Oxford ACS.

Writer of autobiography, poetry, fiction and journalism and Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University Blake Morrison brings some of his latest work and interesting discussion to St. Anne’s.

Novelist Ali Smith, author of Artful, Hotel World, and The Accidental, returns to St. Anne’s after holding the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in European Comparative Literature in 2012.

William Kelly: Artist of Conscience
Thursday 8 May 2014, 6.30-7.30pm (drinks from 6.15pm)

Ashmolean Museum Education Centre
(Evening entrance via St Giles)

Internationally acclaimed US artist William Kelly talks about his life and work. Kelly’s varied career has seen him work as a taxi driver and a welder, before he went on to become a Fulbright Scholar and Dean at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Today Kelly is known as a painter and printmaker and an artist of conscience, committed to a humanist approach in his creative practice. Part of the Why Art Matters series.

Booking essential – £8/£7
http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford/#search=Conscience

speakers:
William Kelly, Artist and Humanist

Dr. Rama Mani, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies at the University of Oxford and Councillor of the World Future Council

Between the artist and the museum

Friday 9 May 2014, 5-6.30pm (doors will open at 4.45pm)

Ashmolean Museum Headley Lecture Theatre

A symposium with Michael Govan (Humanitas Visiting Professor in Museums, Galleries & Libraries at Oxford University) and Vik Muniz (Artist). Chaired by Paul Hobson (Director, Modern Art Oxford).

Free admission but booking is essential.
http://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/humanitas/museums-galleries-libraries

India: A Short History
With Andrew Robinson, author

Saturday 10 May, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

India is the world’s largest democracy and a fast-growing economy. It is also a civilization with roots more than four thousand years old, including the technically advanced cities of the Indus Valley, the Buddha, Hindu dynasties, the Mughal Empire, and the British Raj. This lecture looks at individuals, ideas, and cultures, as well as the rise and fall of kingdoms, political parties, and economies.

Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

A view from the Pacific: re-envisioning the art museum

Tuesday 13 May 2014, 5-6.30pm (doors will open at 4.45pm)

Ashmolean Museum Headley Lecture Theatre

A lecture by Michael Govan (Humanitas Visiting Professor in Museums, Galleries & Libraries at Oxford University). Chaired by Professor Christopher Brown (Director, Ashmolean Museum). The event will be followed by a drinks reception to which members of the audience are warmly invited.

Free admission but booking is essential.
http://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/humanitas/museums-galleries-libraries

Tour: Joseph Beuys & Jörg Immendorff
With Colin Harrison, Senior Curator of European Art

3–3.45pm on Wednesday 14 May and Wednesday 11 June

Tours are free, no booking is required. Please meet in Gallery 2.

http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/details/?exh=92

Magic Museums at Night

Special Ashmolean Late Night Opening
Friday 16 May
7–10pm

FREE ENTRY

For 2014’s Museums At Night event, the Ashmolean is putting on an evening of magic. Curators will be presenting the magical and mystical objects of the collection while visitors are invited for magic shows and workshops, tarot reading, stargazing, flamenco dance and more.

https://www.facebook.com/events/448472011951907/

Magnificence, Love and Scaffolds: Politics at the Court of Henry VIII, With Dr Suzannah Lipscomb
Saturday 17 May, 11am–12pm, Ioannou Centre

Historian, author, and broadcaster Dr Suzannah Lipscomb will speak on the politics of spectacle, persuasion, magnificence, and the politics of love at the court of Henry VIII. The court revolved around the splendid person of the king himself. And although politics was the only game worth playing, it was a dangerous game, ‘for the most part’, Sir Thomas More observed, ‘played on scaffolds’.

Tickets £8/£7
http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford/#search=Magnificence

Clay Live – Special Ceramics Demonstration
With Clive Bowen and Dylan Bowen

Sunday 18 May, 10.30am-3.30pm
Ashmolean Museum Education Centre

Slipware specialists, father and son, Clive and Dylan Bowen demonstrate their work and talk about what has influenced their pottery.

£25/£20 concessions, booking essential.
http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford/#search=clay

On 14 December 2013, the second edition of the Visible Award was awarded to The Silent University, a knowledge exchange platform initiated by the artist Ahmet Öğüt and led by a group of asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants. In recognition of the award, the London branch of The Silent University will produce a two-day event, with the first day organised in collaboration with the Oxford Migration Studies Society and the Refugee Studies Centre.

The event will focus on drawing together members of The Silent University in dialogue with artists, curators, and theoreticians who are working on projects that deal with migration issues in the legal framework of Western democracies. The Visible Award, which in its mission is looking for art that ‘leaves its own field and becomes visible as part of something else,’ is proud to accompany The Silent University in its encounter with the academic realm outside of the space of art.

Join us for lunch from 12:45, with discussion from 13:00 to 13:45.

Professor Averil Cameron will be in discussion with:

– Dr Jas Elsner (Humfrey Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art)
– Dr Peter Frankopan (Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research)
– Dame Jinty Nelson (Emeritus Professor, King’s College London)

About the book:

For many of us, Byzantium remains “byzantine”–obscure, marginal, difficult. Despite the efforts of some recent historians, prejudices still deform popular and scholarly understanding of the Byzantine civilization, often reducing it to a poor relation of Rome and the rest of the classical world. In this book, renowned historian Averil Cameron presents an original and personal view of the challenges and questions facing historians of Byzantium today.

The book explores five major themes, all subjects of controversy. “Absence” asks why Byzantium is routinely passed over, ignored, or relegated to a sphere of its own. “Empire” reinserts Byzantium into modern debates about empire, and discusses the nature of its system and its remarkable longevity. “Hellenism” confronts the question of the “Greekness” of Byzantium, and of the place of Byzantium in modern Greek consciousness. “The Realms of Gold” asks what lessons can be drawn from Byzantine visual art, and “The Very Model of Orthodoxy” challenges existing views of Byzantine Christianity.

Throughout, the book addresses misconceptions about Byzantium, suggests why it is so important to integrate the civilization into wider histories, and lays out why Byzantium should be central to ongoing debates about the relationships between West and East, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and the ancient and medieval periods. The result is a forthright and compelling call to reconsider the place of Byzantium in Western history and imagination.

Averil Cameron is professor emeritus of late antique and Byzantine history at the University of Oxford and former warden of Keble College, Oxford. Her books include The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, The Byzantines, and The Later Roman Empire.

Cézanne and the Modern Exhibition Lecture

Gauguin’s Paradise Lost
With Alastair Wright, Fellow of St John’s College

Friday 23 May, 11am-12pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

Like many Western visitors to Tahiti in the later 19th century, Gauguin bemoaned the destruction of the island’s culture by French colonialism. Examine the roots of this melancholy view of paradise lost and explore how it is reflected in Gauguin’s painting, sculpture, and print-making.

Tickets £4/£3
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/SpecialEvents/?id=148
To find out more about Cézanne and the Modern, and to see all exhibition events, follow this link.

Of Dogs and Men: Gilbert Cannan and his Mill (1916) by Mark Gertler
With Jan Cox, art historian

Friday 23 May, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

This lecture explores and analyses Mark Gertler’s apparently innocent painting of a man, two dogs and a windmill. Discover how the picture tells a story that includes Peter Pan, Scott of the Antarctic, a ménage à trois, insanity, and suicide.

Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

Cézanne and the Modern Exhibition Lecture

Cézanne: a Modern Field of Vision
With Miranda Creswell, Project Artist, Institute of Archaeology

Saturday 24 May, 11am–12pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

Cézanne’s unique and ground-breaking observations of landscape continue to influence artists today. This lecture examines his landscapes, peripheral vision, and his links with contemporary artists and archaeologists.

Tickets £4/£3
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/SpecialEvents/?id=148

Olivier-award winning RSC designer, Stephen Brimson Lewis will be coming to Oxford on Wednesday 28th May. Known especially for his work with RSC artistic director, Gregory Doran, Stephen will be ready to answer your questions, chat about his fascinating career and talk through a variety of his fantastic designs – right up to those for the current Stratford productions of Henry IV parts I and II.

Tickets are £3. To reserve a seat, email OxfordUniversityShakespeareFestival@hotmail.com

onathon Porritt, Co-Founder of Forum for the Future, is an eminent writer, broadcaster, environmentalist and commentator on sustainable development. He will be talking at Cerberus about his new book, ‘The World We Made’, in which he sets out to counter the doom and gloom that surrounds today’s debates about sustainability. Come and listen for a positive and exciting account of what the future could look like.

Who Needs a Hero: Heroism Ancient & Modern
With Prof Chris Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek; Dr Peter Claus, Fellow of Pembroke; Dr Liz Sawyer, Trinity College, University of Oxford

Thursday 29 May, 2–3.30pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

Did Achilles have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? Who was the greater Roman hero: Caesar or Augustus? Was Antigone a heroine or an anarchist? This lecture explores ways in which ‘heroism’ has been constructed and perceived in Western societies since classical times, and how Greek and Roman notions of ‘heroism’ still resonate today. The voices of ancient and modern heroes will be brought to life by Temple Theatre.

Booking essential – £9/£8 (includes tea & cake)
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

This talk will confront an enduring Western belief in the supernatural power of images: the conviction that a statue or painting of the Madonna can fly through the air, speak, weep or produce miraculous cures. Contrary to widely held assumptions, cults of particular paintings and statues held to be miraculous have persisted into modernity – even in the context of the contemporary European city. We shall be considering how these images ‘work’.

The 2014 Roger Moorey Memorial Lecture
Ancient Egyptian Biographies: From Living a Life to Creating a Memorial
With Professor John Baines, University of Oxford

Friday 30 May, 5.30–6.30pm, Wolfson College

More than in most civilizations, ancient Egyptians had themselves depicted in tomb decoration, on stelae, and in statuary. Thousands of examples survive, providing a rich source for studying what mattered to people in their lives and how they wished to be remembered. This lecture makes suggestions about the institutions that sustained the practice of creating biographies and discusses a range of relevant monuments.

Free, no booking is required.

Professor Craig Clunas, lecturer in the History of Art, Fellow at Trinity College and Curator at the British Museum speaks to The Edgar Wind Society.

Clunas’ discussion, ‘Finding (and Exhibiting) the Spiritual in Early Ming Art’ ties in with EWS ’ termly theme of ‘The Spiritual’ (the final in our tripartite exploration of reality)

Clunas has previously held posts at the V&A, SOAS and the University of Sussex.

The Art of Witnessing War
With Dr Sue Malvern, Reading University

Thursday 5 June, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

Sue Malvern looks at the role of war artists and photographers as witnesses to conflicts and wars. Starting with WWI, the lecture looks at how the work of artists such as Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson and Stanley Spencer came to be seen as authentic visions of the actuality of the war. It will then consider the iconic status of works such as Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the role of war photographers, and the contemporary issues for artists who give visual witness to war and conflict.

Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

Cézanne and the Modern Exhibition Lecture

Cézanne and the Modern
With Prof Christopher Butler, University of Oxford

Friday 6 June, 2–3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

Christopher Butler, author of Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916, discusses Cézanne and Modernism in Europe.

Tickets £4/£3
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/SpecialEvents/?id=148

OxTET is happy to welcome Riva-Melissa Tez – lecturer at the DAB university in Berlin, founder of the Berlin Singularity, Associate Director of Longevity Intelligence Communications, and co-runner of Kardashev Communications. Riva will be speaking on obstacles that emerging technology businesses face, analysing factors causing shortfalls in funding, social mistrust, and political dysfunction, and offering recommendations for dealing with these obstacles.

The Psalms in England
With Prof M J Toswel, University of Western Ontario

Tuesday 10 June, 2-3pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

This lecture introduces the Anglo-Saxon psalter, and especially the interlinear vernacular versions in Latin psalters which were a unique feature in Europe at the time, and asks whether these provide evidence for greater engagement with the psalms in English than has generally been acknowledged.

Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/Lectures/?id=132

‘Syria Speaks’ – Seminar Day
With Venetia Porter, British Museum, and Paul Collins, Ashmolean Museum

Wednesday 11 June, 1.30-4pm, Headley Lecture Theatre

The Art of Syria Past and Present:
This lecture explores modern and contemporary art and its impact in Syria today.

Syria: Crossroads of the Ancient World:
From the earliest farming communities and the world’s first cities to the glories of Palmyra, this talk will provide a survey of some of the greatest archaeological treasures of the Middle East.

Tickets £5/£4
http://www.ashmolean.org/events/SpecialEvents/?id=148