Founder's Day Lecture.

'Bringing the Pre-Raphaelites to Italy: What Happened? What Next?' Lecture given by Liz Prettejohn and Peter Trippi.

This Spring (24 February-30 June 2024), almost 125.000 visitors - primarily Italian - have visited the Museo San Domenico in Forli, near Bologna, to experience its landmark loan exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance. Through its 350 artworks and 600 page catalogue, the project traces the profound impact of historical Italian art on the ever-evolving Pre-Raphaelite movement between the 1840 and 1920s by placing British works alongside an unpresedented large number of their Italian forerunners.

On view in Forli are fine and decorative artworks borrowed from museums and private collections worldwide, including the British Museum, V&A, Royal Academy, Royal Collection, Florence Gallerie degli Uffizi, and Rome's Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna. The artists represented include not only renowned figures like Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, Ruskin, Burne-Jones, Morris, Leighton and Watts, but also dozens less familiar to Italian audiences such as William Dyce, Ford Madox Brown, Walter Deverell, Someon Solomon, Marie Spartali Stillman, Evelyn De Morgan and Frederick Cayley Robinson.

Much has been written about the show in Italy, and now its lead co-cuators - Liz Prettejohn and Peter Trippi - would like to explore with their British colleagues what the curatorial team what they learned in Forli. (Their co-curators were Francesco Parisi, Cristina Acidini, Tim Barringer, Charlotte Gere, Stephen Calloway and Veronique Gerard Powell.)

Prettejohn and Trippi are especially eager to hear what members of the Pre-Raphaelite Society think and to map out some possible avenues for future research.

Please join us for this richly illustrated talk, which will feature unpublished photographs of the Forli installation and page spreads from the catalogue.

Liz Prettejohn is Professor of History of Art at the University of York. Her recent research centres on relationships between the srts of past and present, explored in Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First Worls War (2017). Her other books include The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (2000), Beauty and Art 1750-2000 (2005), and The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Wincklemann to Picasso (2012). She is an active guest curator and has co-curated exhibitions on Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. and (with Peter Trippi) John William Waterhouse. Also with Peter Trippi (and other colleagues), she co-curated the exhibition Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity (Leeuwarden, Vienna, and London, 2016-17), which brought to light the important work of women artists in the Alma-Tadema family circle.

Peter Trippi is Editor-in-Chief of Fine Art Connoisseur, the magazine that serves collectors of contemporary and historical realist art, and President of Projects in 19th Century Art, a firm he estalished to pursue research, writing, and curating opportunities. He is also immediate past President of the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation, which supports and raises awareness of the American Institute of Conservation, the leading society of conservation and preservation professionals in the US based in New York City. Trippi directed the Dahesh Museum of Art and co-curated (with Prof. Liz Prettejohn) international touring exhibitions devoted to John William Waterhouse and the family of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. His Waterhouse monograph was published by Phiadon Press in 2002, and he authored an essay in the catalogue accompanying the James Tissot exhibition that visited San Francisco and Paris in 2019-20.