Venice Rising

Organized by Casa Muraro, Columbia’s Center for Venetian Studies, and co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America, Venice Rising offers a series of online lectures, interviews, and workshops on Venice’s transformations, past, present and future. Participants will join us from around the world and from across various disciplines. 

Upcoming & Past Events

Venice as a Muse: The History and Role of the Venice Biennale

July 14, 2021, 12:00 PM EST

Featuring Cecilia Alemani, Curator of The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, in conversation with Alexander Alberro, Virginia Bloedel Wright '51 Professor of Art History at Barnard College.

Regeneration, Impact, and Sustainability: Reconstructing the Teatro San Cassiano of 1637 in 2021

February 1, 2021, 12:00 pm EST 

Paul Atkin, CEO and founder of the Teatro San Cassiano Group
Dame Jane Glover, Conductor and Music Director of Music of the
Giuseppe Gerbino, Professor of Historical Musicology at Columbia University

Elemental Venice

November 23, 2020, 1:00 pm EST 

Shaul Bassi, Center for the Humanities and Social Change, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Daniela Zyman, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna
Jorge Otero-Pailos, GSAPP, Historic Preservation, Columbia University

Focusing on two environmental initiatives recently inaugurated in Venice, namely the Center for Environmental Humanities at Ca' Foscari and TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space, we will discuss approaches to a new "stoicheology" – from the Greek stoicheia (elements) – in an attempt to reanimate and reimagine nature-cultural assemblages, detected in the Venetian lagoon and beyond. Elemental ideas have always belonged to the realm of art, literature, science, and mythology, and are being reanimated today, not as fossilized anachronism, but as collective engines for inquiry and imagination. It is precisely because of their archaic and deep-routed presence in nearly all human accounts, that they might serve us well today and gesture toward a resonant reconnection between “material,” “thought,” and “agency.”

In advance of our event, participants may wish to read Shaul Bassi's NY Times OpEd Waters Close over Venice (Nov. 15, 2019) and a recent article in The Art Newspaper on Ocean Space and the current exhibition Oceans in Transformation


A 5-Point Plan for the Future of Venice

October 29, 2020, 12:30 pm EST 

David Landau, Chairman of Saffron Hill Ventures Ltd and Trustee of The National Gallery Trust
Jonathan Rosand, MD, Columbia University Trustee

Our second event in the Venice Rising Series featured David Landau, Chairman of Saffron Hill Ventures Ltd and Trustee of The National Gallery Trust, in conversation with Columbia University Trustee Jonathan Rosand, MD, '88CC, '94PS. The conversation focused on David Landau's Open Letter to Candidates for Mayor at the last mayoral election in Venice (September 21, 2020) and his suggested 5-Point Plan for the Future of Venice. Alongside the conversation, we invite you to read the Open Letter and Comment in The Art Newspaper.


Titian: Love Desire Death

September 3, 2020, 11:00 am EST

Matthias Wivel, Aud Jebsen Curator of Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings at the National Gallery in London
Cleo Nisse, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and 2020–23 Paul Mellon Fellow, CASVA.
Diane Bodart, David Rosand Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance Art History. 

The first event of the new Venice Rising series featured Matthias Wivel, '04GSAS, Aud Jebsen Curator of Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings at the National Gallery in London, in conversation with Cleo Nisse, '17GSAS, '18GSAS, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and 2020–23 Paul Mellon Fellow, CASVA. The event was introduced by Diane Bodart, David Rosand Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance Art History. 

The conversation focused on the exhibition Titian: Love Desire Death, the first reunion of Titian's famed poesie paintings in 400 years. On view at the National Gallery in London until January 2021, the exhibition will travel across the Atlantic to Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2021.