Johns Hopkins will host this week a two-day symposium,
Petrarch and the Arts, celebrating the 700th anniversary of
the birth of Italian poet and humanist Francesco Petrarch.
Events will take place on Friday, Oct. 22, at the Baltimore
Museum of Art and on Saturday, Oct. 23, at the Peabody
Conservatory of Music.
Petrarch is best known for his Canzoniere, or
Songbook, which for centuries has stood as a model for
fledgling poets in the Western world. Writing in Latin and
the vernacular, Petrarch provided inspiration for early
modern artists and composers.
Free and open to the public, the symposium's lectures
and performances will bring to Baltimore scholars who will
explore the impact of Petrarch on the visual and musical
arts.
The keynote address will be given by Elizabeth
Cropper, dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the
Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Her
talk, at 5 p.m. on Friday at the BMA, will be "Petrarch and
the New Beauty: The Matter of Love in the Cinquecento."
Saturday's events, all at Peabody, include a 1-2 p.m.
music recital by the Peabody Consort, a 4:30-6 p.m.
reception in the George Peabody Library and a 6:30 p.m.
music recital.
From Oct. 22 through Oct. 24, an exhibition called
"From Narrative to Image: Petrarch's Book of Fortune in the
Imagination of a German Humanist" will be presented by the
Sheridan
Libraries in the Reading Room of the George Peabody
Library.
Petrarch and the Arts is sponsored by the departments
of Romance
Languages and Literatures and
History of Art in the Krieger School of Arts and
Sciences, the
Peabody Conservatory and the Sheridan Libraries.
For details, call 410-516-7117 or go to
www.jhu.edu/~arthist/petrarch.html.
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