{program_image_alt Lecture

Making Magnificence: Architects, Stuccatori, and the 18th-Century Interior

Wednesday, October 24 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. Buy Tickets General Public: $25 Driehaus Museum Member: $15.00 ICAA Member: $15.00

Join author Christine Casey for a presentation on her recently published book, which tells the remarkable story of the craftsmen of Ticino, in Italian-speaking Switzerland. These craftsmen took their prodigious skills as specialist decorative plasterworkers throughout Northern Europe in the 18th century, adorning classical architecture with their rich and fluent décor. Their names are not widely known – Giuseppi Artari (c.1690–1771), Giovanni Battista Bagutti (1681–1755), and Francesco Vassalli (1701–1771) are a few – but their work transformed the interiors of magnificent buildings in Italy, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, and Ireland. Among the interiors highlighted in this deeply researched, beautifully illustrated volume are Palazzo Reale in Turin, Upper Belvedere in Vienna, St. Martin in the Fields in London, the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, Houghton Hall in Norfolk, and Carton House in Ireland.

Reception - 5:30-6:15pm
Lecture - 6:15-7:30pm

Professor Christine Casey is an authority on Irish eighteenth-century architecture with particular expertise on the early modern interior in Europe, Britain and Ireland, and on the architecture of Dublin city. She has held a series of international fellowships and awards and is currently the principal investigator on an interdisciplinary research project focused on the Museum Building at Trinity College Dublin. She has published widely on Irish architecture including two volumes in the Yale University Press Buildings of Ireland series and has recently published a critically acclaimed study of architecture and decoration in early modern Europe, Britain and Ireland (Making magnificence, Yale 2017). An honorary member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, she has served as a board and committee member on several Irish national organizations for architectural heritage including the Castletown Foundation, the Heritage Council, the Irish Architectural Archive and the Irish Georgian Society. She is a Professor in Architectural History and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.

This program is presented in partnership with the Chicago-Midwest Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA).

Use of Photography Please note that in exchange for your reservation and/or ticket, you have authorized the Driehaus Museum to photograph, record, film, video tape, or otherwise use your likeness, performance, image, and/or voice for use in general and/or program-related Driehaus Museum promotional materials. If for any reason, you do not wish to be photographed, please provide your name(s) at check-in on the day of the event.