The British Museum Lectures
Our British Museum Lectures series is a rich and collaborative programme of events with British Museum curators across our four bookshops, each accompanying a magnificent new exhibition in London. This is the British Museum - brought to your doorstep!
Michelangelo: the last decades
Bath - Monday 10th June, 7pm at the bookshop, York Street
Ely - Wednesday 26th June, 7:30pm at the Methodist Church, Chapel Street
This exhibition at the British Museum is running between 2nd May - 28th July 24.
Tracing the final 30 years of Michelangelo's career, curator Sarah Vowles examines how the great master used art and faith to explore the common human experience of ageing in a rapidly changing world.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance.
He was not the isolated, tortured genius of artistic myth, but a man who maintained a close circle of friends and associates into old age. He developed collaborative working relationships with younger artists, thereby maintaining his fame and reputation even as he aged, relinquishing the hardest physical work to others.
Alongside his major commissions he created deeply personal drawings - revisiting earlier compositions to explore intensely moving Crucifixions that served as spiritual meditations on Christ's death and offered the hope of salvation for an elderly man facing the end of his own long life. His late drawings offer a powerful insight into his psychology, reflecting his Catholic faith, his commanding intellectual engagement, and his hope for eternal life.
Sarah Vowles is Smirnov Family Curator of Italian and French Prints and Drawings and curator of the exhibition Michelangelo: the last decades, opening in May 2024 at the British Museum.
Previous British Museum Lectures
Legion: life in the Roman army
Bath - 26th February 2024, 7:30pm at St Swithin's Church NOW PAST
Edinburgh - Friday 19th April, 7:30pm at Greenside Church NOW PAST
Ely - Monday 29th April, 7:30pm at The Lighthouse Auditorium
The Legion exhibition is running at the British Museum from the 1st February-23rd June 24.
Richard Abdy, curator of Legion, comes to Bath, Ely and Edinburgh to talk about the extraordinary new British Museum exhibition – and what life was like in the Roman army.
The scale and organisation of the Roman army was unprecedented in the ancient Western world. This book tells the story of everyday aspects of the army in the heyday of the Roman Empire – from life in a tent to the food soldiers consumed – and explains its hierarchy, roles, equipment and place in a vast multi-ethnic society divided between citizens and subjects.
Abdy has been a curator of Roman coins at the British Museum for many years, with particular interest in the middle and later imperial periods of the Roman Empire.