Caroline Arscott, a professor of 19th century art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, will deliver “Color as Lure and Provocation: William Morris’ Tapestry, ‘The Woodpecker,’ 1885” as the 2013 Allen R. Hite Lecture. The talk is Monday, Feb. 11, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. in Chao Auditorium, Ekstrom Library.
Arscott wrote “William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings.” She will talk about Morris’ tapestry “The Woodpecker” (1885) in which the bird refers to the story of Picus from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” Within that context, Arscott also will discuss the woodpecker’s significance in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and other Victorian theories of evolution and the evolutionary emergence of consciousness.
Earlier in the day, Arscott and Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, assistant professor of modern art at the Hite Art Institute, will have a public conversation on modern art, Victorian science and the body. It will be at 10 a.m. in Chao Auditorium.
Hazel Dodge, the Louis Claude Purser associate professor in classical archaeology at Trinity College Dublin, will give the talk, “Symbols of Victory and Colors of Power: Egyptian Stones for the City of Rome,” Thursday, Feb. 14 as the 2013 Frederic Lindley Morgan Lecture. It starts at 6 p.m. in Chao Auditorium.
Dodge will discuss obelisks quarried in Egypt and erected in Rome as both victory monuments and symbols of imperial ideology, as well as gray granite and purple porphyry Romans imported from two different Egyptian quarries. She will examine evidence from the Egyptian quarries, the effects of the stone on the city of Rome and the legacy of the practice in more recent times.
Admission to the talks is free and open to the public.
