Tresillian Arts Centre presents: The Invention of Baroque Rome & the Modern Circulating City
Tuesday 25th March 2025

Tresillian Arts Centre presents
The Invention of Baroque Rome and the Modern Circulating City
An art history lecture by Emeritus Professor Richard Read
This lecture is devoted to the political and intellectual origins of the planned city as it emerged as a symbol of the Absolute State in seventeenth-century Rome.
It raises fundamental issues concerning the division of the artisanal from the managerial classes in the Italian Renaissance, but looks forward to the Baroque programme of the city as an expression of Counter-Reformation ideals.
Emeritus Professor Richard Read is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Western Australia where he was Professor of Art History.
He wrote the first book on the British art critic Adrian Stokes, which won a national prize, and has published in major journals on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, the history of art theory, nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Australian art history, sensory perception and landscape painting, contemporary film, and complex images in global contexts.
For many years he gave lectures on seventeenth-century art and architecture at UWA and has recently returned from a Visiting Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, where he pursued research and lectured on his book The Reverse Canvas: Metapainting in Western Art, which has many Baroque themes and is under contract with Bloomsbury Visual Art, London.
There is a $30 fee to attend, please book online here.
Image: St Peter's Basilica, Rome