Glass and Painting in Renaissance Venice

In Renaissance Venice the glass-blowers of Murano were technically the most advanced in Europe. Their innovations in table-glass were as keenly sought after by the cultural elite as the paintings of Titian and Tintoretto. This lecture explores the relation between the changing aesthetics of glass in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the achievements of the Venetian painters.

Paul Hills is well known for his publications on colour, on Italian Renaissance art, and on the poet and painter David Jones. After studying at Cambridge, he took an MA and a PhD at The Courtauld Institute, London. During his time as lecturer at Warwick University, from 1976 to 1998, he directed the History of Art programme in Venice. In 1981 he curated the retrospective exhibition of David Jones at the Tate Gallery and he has continued to write catalogue essays on Jones and on such contemporary artists as Simon Lewty, Ana Maria Pacheco and Antoni Malinowski. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York; Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies; and the Royal College of Art. In 2003 Hills was appointed Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor at The Courtauld, and took up a permanent post in 2004. He has lectured on Renaissance art at international venues, including Harvard University, the Prado, the Louvre, and the National Gallery in London. His books include David Jones (Tate Gallery, 1981), The Light of Early Italian Painting (Yale, 1987), and Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250-1550 (Yale, 1999). His work on Italian art has been translated into Spanish, Italian and French.