Event Start Date: 08 November 2026

Alumni, staff and current students are warmly invited to join us either in person or online for this talk, organised by the Art History Network, at 3pm on Sunday 8 November.  If you attend in person in the Margaret Thatcher Centre, there will be afternoon tea at the end of the talk. 

We are delighted to welcome Helen Glanville to speak to us, who studied Modern Languages at Somerville from 1975 and specialised in the humanist literature of the Italian Renaissance. She also trained at the Courtauld Institute as a conservator-restorer of paintings, giving her a scientific background, and worked as a practising restorer in the museum world for many years in the UK and France, including at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Dulwich Picture Gallery. 

Her interdisciplinary background has enabled her to specialise in a field now known as ‘technical art history’ – that is the interpreting of results of scientific analyses in scientific research institutions in the light of the thought, writings and cultural contemporary context of the painting and artist being studied. Poussin’s  philosophy and practice were the subject of her recently acquired PhD from La Sapienza University in Rome and her broader area of interest and research is the relationship between humanism and painting practice in the Renaissance.

For this talk, she will focus particularly on two works by Tintoretto (father and son) and Nicolas Poussin.

BOOK HERE

As with all Somerville alumni events, if you would like to attend in person but need help with the booking costs, then remember that the Senior Members Fund offers financial assistance (email Jackie Watson jacqueline.watson@some.ox.ac.uk to enquire).

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