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The Georgian period (1713-1830) is regarded as the greatest period of English architecture. However most of London’s Georgian houses date from the late 18C, and very little was built in London during the 1730’s due to a prolonged recession. 68 Dean Street forms part of a coherent group of houses built by Meard Jnr between about 1720 and 1732. There is nothing quite like this group surviving in London. Meard built one group of small houses, then a second group of larger houses, now all forming ‘Meard’s Street’, and finally three large town houses – 67, 68 & 69 Dean Street. The Meard Street houses were built on the land which originally formed the gardens of just five houses – two in Dean Street and Wardour Street, plus one house in the middle.
68 Dean Street is an exceptional example of the strict spatial and decorative hierarchy which creates the special character and feeling of this period in English architecture. The house has been under extensive restoration since the 1990s. It is now the beautiful home of BIS member David Bieda, who has looked after the property in an exquisite way. David will give us a tour of the house and will tell us the fascinating stories behind 68 Dean Street, including the remarkable discoveries made during the restoration.
We will also have the opportunity to view some special pieces of art collected by David, including prints by De Chirico, Braque and Dali.
David Bieda is Chairman of the Seven Dials Trust, which reconstructed the Sundial Pillar at Seven Dials and has so far raised over £2m for exemplary street improvements and encouraged investment in façade improvements of over £3.5m.
For further information about 68 Dean Street, visit: http://www.sixty8.com. Information about the Trust’s work can be found at: www.sevendials.com.
The tour of the house will begin at 7pm. David has kindly offered to provide drinks during the visit.
Please note that places are limited. We will allocate them on a first come first served basis. Should there be a waiting list, we will give priority to members over guests.
To mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, The British Library has brought together highlights from three of his remarkable notebooks. Through pages of Leonardo’s handwritten notes, drawings and diagrams, prepare to explore the inner workings of his complex mind and his fascination with motion – which Leonardo considered to be ‘the cause of all life’.
For the first time in the UK, the exhibition displays highlights from one of the British Library’s finest treasures, the Codex Arundel, alongside the Codex Forster from the V&A and a selection of sheets from the Codex Leicester. Widely considered to be one of Leonardo’s most important scientific notebooks, the Codex Leicester will be shown in this country for the first time since it was purchased by Bill Gates.
See Leonardo’s mirror handwriting up close; marvel at his detailed studies of natural phenomena, especially water; admire his intricate drawings of such things as an underwater breathing apparatus; and study his observations on subjects as varied as the formation of waves and air bubbles, river flow, the velocity of wind, and the nature of light and shadow.
As your journey through the exhibition concludes, studies for Leonardo’s famous painting, the Virgin of the Rocks, reveal how his observations of nature in motion directly informed his ability to portray human movement in the artistic masterpieces for which he is known today.
Stephen Parkin, Curator of the Printed Heritage Collections, and Co-Curator of the Leonardo Exhibition will give us a short introduction and an overview of the exhibition with the opportunity to ask questions.
Stephen’s talk will start promptly at 4pm, followed by a tour of the Exhibition at 4.30pm (timed entry slot). Please meet us in the lobby of the British Library at 3.50pm.
You will be very welcome to join us for a summer aperitivo at a nearby bar afterwards.
PLACES ARE LIMITED. SO PLEASE BOOK EARLY. WE WILL GIVE PRIORITY TO MEMBERS ON ANY WAITING LIST.
Please note that the ticket covers the talk and entry to the Exhibition only: drinks will need to be purchased individually
If paying via bank transfer please quote reference: DAVINCI
More information on the exhibition: https://www.bl.uk/events/leonardo-da-vinci-a-mind-in-motion#
~ Charles de Chassiron Memorial Lecture ~
Rooms and Views: Filming in Florence with Merchant Ivory
A Room with a View, the award-winning film directed by James Ivory and adapted from E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel, has become a classic of twentieth-century film-making. Following its release in 1986 it has helped to bring Forster’s light satire of Edwardian morals and manners, on which it is closely based, back into the public consciousness. The Merchant Ivory team of Ismail Merchant as producer, James Ivory as director and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, scriptwriter, had collaborated on feature films since 1963, and they specialised in adapting English language classics for the cinema.
A Room with a View is not as complex as Forster’s later novels, but its enduring appeal lies in its colourful cast of characters, witty dialogue, and amusing play on the manners and morals of the day, as well as Forster’s sympathetic portrayal of his heroine, Lucy Honeychurch. The book’s qualities are vividly reflected in the film, which was shot in Florence and in Kent over ten weeks, during the summer of 1985. Sarah Quill will discuss the making of the film and will illustrate her talk with the photographs she took, both on and off the set.
Sarah has worked between London and Venice since 1971, building up an extensive photographic archive of Venetian architecture, sculpture and daily life. She has also worked as the stills photographer on a number of feature films, including Wagner (1982), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), A Room with a View (1986), and White Mischief (1988). Her book, Ruskin’s Venice: The Stones Revisited was published in 2000, followed by a new and extended edition in 2015, which has recently been translated into Italian. She lectures regularly, principally on Venetian subjects, and is a trustee of the Venice in Peril Fund.
The talk will begin (following a short pause after the AGM) at about 7 pm
A glass of wine will be offered after the talk
Members who wish to attend the AGM, but not stay for the lecture, are not required to pay a fee or book online. But they are requested to contact Elisabetta by e-mail or telephone to confirm their place.
The event will take place at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House
Please join us for what promises to be a very enjoyable evening of music with a Venetian theme.
Two exceptionally talented performers, Countertenor Alexander Simpson and Pianist Michael Pandya, will give the recital. Those who came to the Society’s wonderful concert in January 2018 will remember Michael’s performance as accompanist that evening.
The programme will feature a varied and stimulating range of opera and song music, including:
Strozzi L’Eraclito Amoroso
Monteverdi E Pur lo Torno Qui
Adagiati, Poppea (from l’Incoronazione di Poppea)
Handel Furibondo spira il vento (from Partenone)
Mendelssohn Venetianisches Gondelied opus 57 no 5
Schumann 2 Venetianisches Lieder:
Hahn Venezia
The programme might be subject to minor variations
A glass of wine will be offered after the recital
Performers
Alexander Simpson is a versatile young British Countertenor and actor, who enjoys performing a wide repertoire.
Alexander has a keen interest in the works of J S Bach, and was Runner-up in the London Bach Society’s Bach Singers’ Prize in 2017. He has worked with some of the country’s leading baroque musicians, and appears regularly as a soloist in major choral works. He won the Rosenblatt Recitals Singing Prize in 2016. He has also won many other prestigious awards, and has performed in such venues as Kings Place, Cadogan Hall and St George’s, Hanover Square. He is currently collaborating with ArtHouse Jersey. Alexander will be performing in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at the Waterperry Opera Festival in July.
Alexander read music at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he was a Choral Scholar. He went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music on a full scholarship. He is a member of the Royal Academy Opera.
Michael Pandya is a versatile young pianist, specialising in song and chamber music. His recent touring schedule has taken him across the UK and Europe.
Michael won the prestigious Brenda Webb Award for Accompaniment at the Royal Academy of Music. He has received numerous other prizes, including the Joan Chissells/Rex Stephens Schumann Lieder Prize, the Vivian Langrish Piano Prize and the Pianist Prize at the Rosenblatt North London Singing Competition. In 2017 he was awarded a Graham Johnson Fellowship at SongFest in Los Angeles.
Michael graduated from Queen’s College, Oxford with First Class Honours in 2015. There he directed student operas by Albinoni, Haydn and Michael Nyman, and worked as a repetiteur with New Chamber Opera for two years. He was also Accompanist in Residence for the Oxford Lieder Festival. Michael now studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
For the Romans life meant getting together to eat and drink, in a pub or at a banquet. Last Supper in Pompeii celebrates the Roman love affair with food and drink – a journey from fields and vineyards to markets and shops, from tables to toilets and the tomb.
We see the influence of the Greeks and mysterious Etruscans, and visit fertile Vesuvius to see how Romans got their food and drink (and a Roman vineyard buried in AD79). Into the bustling city, past hawkers, shops and bars, we enter the house, visit the shrine of the gods and the gorgeous garden with its flowers and fountains. We recline in the dining room, with exotic food and fine wine, and surrounded by Greek-style luxury – fine silver, mosaics and frescoes.
But in the kitchen? No refrigeration, no running water, no hygiene – and there is the toilet, feeding into a cess pit below. Escape to Roman Britain with objects from sleepy Chedworth and metropolitan London with the first brewer, the first cooper and even the first pub landlord! Finally we see the monuments of the dead feasting into the afterlife and return to Pompeii to meet a real victim of the eruption.
Seize the day – Carpe diem!!
Dr Paul Roberts is the Sackler Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford University. He studied at the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield and Oxford, and lived in Italy for several years, in Milan, Rome and Naples. He has excavated in Britain, Greece, Libya, Turkey and in particular Italy, where he directs excavations in the Sabine hills near Rome and near Campobasso in Molise. His research focuses on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people in the Greek and Roman worlds; and he has written books on Roman daily life, Roman Emperors, and Roman art.
From 1994 to 2014 he was Roman Curator in the Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum, where he curated the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (2013). At the Ashmolean he co-curated the exhibition Storms, War and Shipwrecks: Sicily and the Sea (2016) telling the history of Sicily through shipwreck finds around the island. He is now working on the exhibition Last Supper in Pompeii, telling the story of the ancient Roman love affair with food and drink (at the Ashmolean Museum July 2019 – January 2020).
Drinks will be offered after the talk
Image: A fresco showing a dinner party in full swing. Men and women recline together and one guest starts to sing!
Since it was founded in 1941, the British-Italian Society has worked to promote knowledge and understanding in the UK of Italian culture, including Italy’s history, institutions, way of life, language and wider contribution to civilisation.
The British-Italian Society
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London EC2A 4NE