Series: E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series

A thought-provoking study of how knowledge of provenance was not transferred with enslaved people and goods from the Portuguese trading empire to Renaissance Italy. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of "goods" from Portuguese trading voyages—fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals, and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that this imperial "opening...

Ben Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having 'small Latin and less Greek.' But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modelled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatrical profession that had inherited the conventions and forms of...

A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artists Between the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination—poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and religious—displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent and flight to the heavens. Celestial Aspirations explores how British literature and art during that period exploited classical...