Viewing & Lecture - Sandro Botticelli's Venus

To celebrate art and friendship, members are invited to an Evening at the Museum for a special private viewing of Botticelli's Venus with UMAG Director Dr. Florian Knothe. The evening's program includes a lecture, Botticelli as a Painter of Nudes, presented by Italian art scholar Dr. Opher Mansour from the University's Fine Arts Department.

About the Exhibition
Celebrating its 60th anniversary, the University Museum and Art Gallery proudly presents a true Italian masterpiece – Venus (1482) by Florentine Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510). Patronized by noble families including the Medici, Botticelli produced a number of unique Venus paintings – one of which, a treasure from the celebrated Galleria Sabauda in Turin, will be on view in Hong Kong for the first time from 14 October through 15 December 2013.

Lecture – Botticelli as a Painter of Nudes
Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) originally trained as a goldsmith in his teenage years before his apprenticeship with Fra Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) in 1461-1467, a period when he gradually developed his independent style while still absorbing inspiration from his master. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, and became best known for his paintings of 'Primavera' (ca. 1482) and 'The Birth of Venus' (ca. 1486), two representations of Venus to which the tableau in the Museum's exhibition is strongly related. This lecture will situate Botticelli, his oeuvre and the stylistic and painterly qualities of his Venus in the Italian Renaissance, and provide background information and context on the artist and his contemporaries.

Speaker
Dr. Opher Mansour teaches courses on Baroque art, European architecture and urbanism, and on the visual culture of exploration and imperialism in the Fine Arts Department of The University of Hong Kong. He studied art history at the University of Cambridge and, later, at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he wrote his PhD thesis on the artists' responses to censorship in Counter-Reformation Rome. His research focuses on Italian art of the late 16th and 17th centuries, and in particular on Rome, and on debates about the value and purpose of art in the early-modern period. Before coming to HKU, he taught at the Courtauld Institute, Dartmouth College, the Catholic University of America, and the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.