The Invention of Baroque Rome and the Modern Circulating City

This lecture is devoted to the political and intellectual origins of the planned city as it emerged as a symbol of the Absolute State in seventeenth-century Rome.

It raises fundamental issues concerning the division of the artisanal from the managerial classes in the Italian Renaissance, but looks forward to the Baroque programme of the city as an expression of Counter-Reformation ideals.

Emeritus Professor Richard Read is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Western Australia where he was Professor of Art History.  He wrote the first book on the British art critic Adrian Stokes, which won a national prize, and has published in major journals on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, the history of art theory, nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Australian art history, sensory perception and landscape painting, contemporary film, and complex images in global contexts. For many years he gave…