January 26, 2005
The Etruscan Forgeries of Curzio Inghirami
Ingrid Rowland, American Academy in Rome
Born in the age of Galileo to an illustrious family with ties to the Medici, Curzio Inghirami (1614-1655) staged perhaps the most outlandish prank of the seventeenth century when he forged Etruscan documents. The teenager's wild scheme scandalized all of Rome and became the topic of heated discussion from Malta to Scandinavia. Rowland, author of a new book about the forgeries, discussed Inghirami and his motives.
February 23, 2005
The Furniture of Versailles, Then and Now
Pierre Arizzoli-Clémentel, Château de Versailles
The director of the museum at Versailles explored the history of the French royal collections and their dispersal during the Revolution, highlighting several examples from The Frick Collection. He also discussed the château's current collection and its conservation during the last fifty years.
March 30, 2005
Manet's Dead Toreador
Theodore Reff, Columbia University
 Manet's haunting Dead Toreador (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and the Frick's Bullfight were once part of a larger canvas painted in 1864 titled An Incident in the Bullring. The lecturer reconstructed the painting's original composition, analyzed its historical and pictorial sources, and related it to representations of bullfighting and other works by Manet with Spanish subjects. He also speculated on its implicit political content.
This lecture was the third in an annual series sponsored by the Council of The Frick Collection and will be available in published form at the Museum Shop.
April 13, 2005
Lieutenant Colonel Boscawen and His Collection of Bronzes
Victoria Avery, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies
Many of the bronze statuettes in the special exhibition from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, are from the remarkable collection of Colonel Boscawen (1892-1958), a renowned explorer, naturalist, and botanist who owned large plantations in East Africa. This lecture examined Boscawen's life and his exacting standards as a collector.
May 11, 2005
Gender, Devotion, and Storytelling in the Early Renaissance: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Meditations on the Life of Christ
Holly Flora, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, The Frick Collection
Nuns were among the most important patrons for works of art in the early Italian Renaissance, as they used panel paintings, frescoes, and manuscripts to enhance their prayers and to induce mystical experiences. This talk will focus on a fourteenth-century manuscript made for nuns living in Pisa, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Through almost two hundred colorful images and its unique approach to anecdotal storytelling, this manuscript promoted a life of poverty, virginity, and meditation for its female monastic audience.
June 1, 2005
From Callot to Greuze: Discoveries and Attributions in Weimar
Pierre Rosenberg, L’Académie française, Paris
The Director Emeritus of the Louvre and the organizer of the Frick’s summer exhibition will discuss cataloguing and publishing the entire collection of Weimar’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French drawings, focusing on several discoveries and reattributions.
October 14, 2005
Memling and the Art of Portraiture
Till-Holger Borchert, Groeningemuseum, Bruges
The chief curator of the Groeningemuseum will provide an overview of the career of Hans Memling, the subject of the Frick’s fall special exhibition, Memling’s Portraits. Borchert, who edited the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, will discuss patronage, the artist’s sitters, the function of portraiture, and the way in which Memling was influenced by earlier Netherlandish portraiture.
October 26, 2005
Memling’s Influence on Italian Portraiture
from Leonardo to Raphael
Barbara G. Lane, Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
This lecture will highlight a number of portraits by Memling that were in Italy during the late quattrocento, tracing their influence on Italian portraiture from the 1470s to the first decade of the sixteenth century.
November 16, 2005
Face to Face with Memling’s Portraits
Maryan W. Ainsworth, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Memling’s Portraits offers an unparalleled opportunity to reconsider this aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. The lecture will explore the working methods behind the extraordinary results that secured Memling’s reputation as Bruges’s most successful fifteenth-century portraitist.
November 30, 2005
Artists, Poets, and Writers Lecture Series
Henry James’s New York
Colm Tóibín, author
Henry James’s novel Washington Square, sections of his travel book The American Scene, and his memoir A Small Boy cover a crucial forty years in the history of New York City, 1865 to 1905. The speaker, winner of The Los Angeles Times 2004 Novel of the Year award, will discuss the city as well as James’s own sense of the development of American taste during this period.
The Artists, Poets, and Writers Lecture Series at The Frick Collection is made possible through the generous support of the Drue Heinz Trust.
December 7, 2005
Memling’s Italian Patrons
Paula Nuttall, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Working in the cosmopolitan city of Bruges, Memling found a ready market for his art among the Italian mercantile community. This lecture will look at the varied commissions he produced for his Italian clients, including Tommaso Portinari, manager of the Medici Bank.
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