For the 450th anniversary of the death of the famous painter, writer and art historian Giorgio Vasari the national museum of Villa Guinigi is organizing a conference with professor Chiara Franceschini on Thursday (27 June) at 5pm.
The museum preserves a panel with two side panels from one of Giorgio Vasari’s most important works: L’Altar of the Conception set up between 1543 and 1544 for the chapel of Biagio Mei in the church of San Pier Cigoli (Santa Maria del Carmine) in Lucca, destroyed in the 1930s to make room for the city market. In relation to this important work from Lucca by the Arezzo artist – whose genesis, workmanship and iconography will be reconstructed during the conference – many different stories unfold which intertwine events and contexts articulated on different temporal and geographical levels that go beyond the city walls: from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and from Florence to Peru.
Chiara Franceschini she teaches history of modern art at the IMT School of Advanced Studies in Lucca as a full professor. After studying at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, she worked at the Warburg Institute in London and was a lecturer in medieval and Renaissance studies at University College London, before taking on the role of senior lecturer in the history of modern art at the University Ludwig-Maximilian of Munich. He deals with Renaissance and modern art in Mediterranean Europe and in particular with Florentine and Roman painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with modern history and the role of art, architecture and objects in society through time and space, of historiography and theory of art. Among her publications: History of limbo (Feltrinelli 2017), Chapels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Early Modern Rome (with SF Ostrow and P. Tosini, Officina Libraria 2020) e Sacred Images and Normativity (Brepols 2021).
