On the initiative of the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, and in collaboration with the Legion of Honor Museum, a webinar will take place today, 09 November (11 am pst; 8 pm in Italy) on “The Renaissance of Pastels”. It will include contributions by Furio Rinaldi, Curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who will illustrate the evolution of pastel via a number of masterpieces currently on display in the exhibition “Color into Line: Pastels from the Renaissance to the Present”, which will be running until next 13 February, and by Laura Da Rin Bettina, who will explore the complex origins of this painting technique in Renaissance Italy.
Pastel is one of the most expressive and adaptable media in the history of art, and its use in creative work and design has survived almost unchanged for five centuries. Invented and perfected in the early 16th century, it came to great popularity and widespread use in the 18th century.
Furio Rinaldi is an expert on 15th and 16th century Italian drawings. He has co-organised and contributed to numerous exhibitions in Italy and the United States, and has published extensively on the subject in academic publications and books.
Laura Da Rin Bettina took her PhD in History of Art from the University of Parma in 2016, with a thesis on the use of pastel in 16th-century Italy. In 2014 she joined the Euploos Project (https://euploos.uffizi.it), a multi-year research and cataloguing project to catalogue the collection of drawings of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. Her research focuses on Italian drawings of the 16th and 17th centuries.
To register for the event: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_N5bp7X7wSQ-x1ORVAwuYSQ