On the occasion of the exhibition ”Giovanni Stradano. Le più strane e belle invenzioni del mondo”, curated by Alessandra Baroni and held at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (17 November 2023-18 February 2024), the Netherlands Interuniversity Institute for Art History (NIKI) organises an international conference on Johannes Stradanus and on the many ways in which the artist from Bruges,“with the flowers of his art, made Florence appear even more beautiful” (Van Mander).

On behalf of the Director of the Netherlands Interuniversity Institute for Art History (NIKI), Michael W. Kwakkelstein, we have the pleasure to invite you to the lecture by our scholar-in-residence, Takuma Ito (Associate Professor, Renaissance Art History, Kyushu University, Japan), entitled “Perugino and the Management of Styles: ‘Andrea d’Assisi’ Reconsidered”.

The collaborating Dutch universities: Leiden University, Utrecht University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam), along with the Dutch University Institute for Art History in Florence (NIKI) invite alumni from these universities to attend an evening of academic discussion and networking.

This lecture explores the functions, iconography, and symbolic meanings of heliotrope in light of current discourses on the materiality of stones in early modern Europe – and beyond.

The conference focuses on the Italian Renaissance artists’ workshop practice. While many scholars consider the work made in artists’ workshops and much recent scholarship seeks to attribute the outputs of the assistants of well-known painters and sculptors, there are still many questions concerning quotidian life in the workshop that have attracted little scholarly attention, and about which we know very little – or practically nothing.

In order to gain a better understanding of the functioning of early modern sketchbooks from the North, this expert-meeting aims to look beyond the separate folios to uncover the rationale behind these objects.