For those who are within striking distance of Madison, Wisconsin, I am giving a talk on Saturday (November 3rd) at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison as part of a series of events to support a travelling exhibition of works belonging to the Uffizi gallery of Florence, Italy. It is a great honour to be asked to give this presentation and to share the platform with the curator of paintings at the Chazen Museum of Art, Maria Saffiotti Dale. More details of the museum and the exhibition - Offering of the Angels: Paintings and Tapestries from the Uffizi Gallery -  can be found here. There is one gothic painting and the others are Renaissance or Baroque. There are 45 rarely seen paintings from the great Florentine gallery, including works by Lorenzo Monaco, Botticelli, Tintoretto and Titian. In my talk I will discuss how the style of these periods is influenced by Christian theology and philosophy with particular reference to some of the paintings in the exhibition.

  Luca Giordano (1634–1705), The Ascent to Calvary, 1685–1686