Sat 24 & 31 Oct, 7, 14, 21 & 28 Nov and 5 & 12 Dec, 2–4pm
Speaker Associate Professor John Armstrong, Philosopher in Residence, Melbourne Business School
Cost per lecture $27 Adult / $18 NGV Member / $21 Concession / $15 Student
Venue Clemenger BBDO Auditorium, NGV International
Event code P09111
We stand at the extraordinary historical moment, when the artistic dominion of the West is finally giving place to a global and multi-polar cultural order. Two grand narratives – Idealism and Pragmatism – provide a structure for thinking about and looking at and understanding the greatest art of the West. This lecture series traces the intertwining of two basic issues. Firstly, there is Idealism: the fact that our vision of perfection always runs beyond anything we can achieve. This is both inspiring and potentially dispiriting; it is noble, and yet tragic. Secondly, there is Pragmatism: the capacity to make the most of what is to hand, to compromise, to organise, to get things done.

Lecture Two: Trade and Taste
Sat 31 Oct, 2pm
After the collapse of Rome, political instability led a few people to seek refuge in the bleak swamps where the river Po enters the Adriatic Sea. But by an astonishing combination of luck, initiative and ruthless organisation, the people of Venice established a commercial empire and built a magnificent, unique city. They managed to combine entrepreneurial flair and fine artistic sensibility. Their city was, at first, a place of refuge because it was simply not worth attacking, became in time the envy of the world.

Lecture Three: Faith and Knowledge
Sat 7 Nov, 2pm
Although we perhaps associate the integration of Faith and Knowledge with the medieval period, it was also an important theme of the Renaissance. In the writings of two of the most interesting philosophers of the Renaissance – Ficino and Pico della Mirandola – there is ambitious discussion of the relationship between pagan knowledge (meaning the philosophy and literature of classical antiquity) and religious truth (meaning the Christian doctrines derived from the old and new Testaments).

Lecture Four: Grandeur and Grace
Sat 14 Nov, 2pm
The style known as Baroque – which was powerful impulse in art, architecture and music from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century – was a major development of the classical tradition. It took up the elements of Renaissance classicism and put them to dramatic and emotional use. We’ll be looking at some of the grandest of all artistic achievements: the Baroque palaces designed by Sir John Vanbrugh. But these buildings did not arrive at their full perfection until, a generation later, they were given their ideal landscape setting. And this landscape was influenced by the vision of natural grace perfected by the French painter Claude. Confusingly, perhaps, Claude had been at work long before the buildings were constructed, but his influence on landscape gardening was long delayed.

Lecture Five: Reason and Restraint
Sat 21 Nov, 2pm
Jane Austen is famous for her wit, her evocation of young women in love and the pleasures of genteel life. But she is a great artist because she combines a warm sense of experience with devotion to a moral and social code that stresses restraint, civility, good manners, modesty and dignity. Is her allure today a reflection of our yearning for these qualities – about which she is so insistent and emphatic, while we feel awkward and unsure? The merits of Jane Austen’s writing are closely connected to the principles of architecture current in her day. The cities of Bath and Edinburgh – which were beautifully expanded during her lifetime – are two of the world’s the most admired architectural achievements.

Lecture Six: Confidence and Longing
Sun 28 Nov, 2pm
This lecture explores two major themes of the nineteenth century. One is the cult of Romanticism, which emphasised longing for various unattainable things: the past, fusion with nature, the divine. The other is the confident conviction that art can heal and help society. These two themes come together in the work of the art critic, social reformer and colossus of Victorian intellectual life, John Ruskin. No other writer in the history of the West has had such immense ambitions for art, nor such determination to put those ambitions into practice. Although Ruskin was a great champion of the art of the past – he especially loved the old Italian cities of Venice, Sienna and Pisa and the paintings of Tintoretto and Turner – he set himself the mission of creating an art of equal stature in his own time.

Lecture Seven: Freedom and Tradition
Sat 5 Dec, 2pm
This lecture will look at the intimate, charming world of the Bloomsbury movement. It was a transitional movement. It emphasised individual freedom to live and love as one liked, it placed a high value on pleasure and personal creativity. It was concerned with conversation, as much as with writing, gardening and painting. Bloomsbury saw itself as casting off the dead weight of Victorianism. Yet, paradoxically, Bloomsbury was a product of nineteenth century wealth and the opportunities this created. It was an aristocratic movement in democratic disguise. In retrospect, its values are traditional: craftsmanship, beauty, the amateur, the country house. In fact Bloomsbury looked as much to the past (to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) as it did to the future. It is perhaps best understood as a ‘renaissance’ – a reanimation of old ideals newly adapted to current needs.

Lecture Eight: Guilt, Complexity - and Restoration?
Sat 12 Dec, 2pm
The cataclysmic destruction in Europe, over three decades from 1914 to 1945, ushered in a new era. The old order appeared to have destroyed itself. The sophistication and huge cultural accumulation of old Europe had been no guarantee of peace, wisdom or beauty. On the contrary, it had all somehow led to trench warfare, Revolution and totalitarianism in Russia, Fascism, the bombing of cities and the death camps. The new era was understandably marked by guilt, and the profound loss of confidence that guilt brings with it. What place could there now be for grace, dignity, elegance, pride and serenity? And so the art of the new age was marked by a rejection of the great tradition. And where do we go now?