Afternoon lectures start at 14:30 and evening lectures at 19:00
Tuesday 11 November 2025
Helen Rufus-Ward: The Mosaics of Ravenna:
For the Glory of Kings, Emperors and Empresses
In 402AD Ravenna became the capital of the Western Roman Empire and continued to prosper under Ostrogoth and then Byzantine rule. This past eminence left Ravenna with a legacy of richly decorated early Christian buildings, which has earned it UNESCO World Heritage site status. This lecture will explore some of these buildings and their magnificent mosaics: The octagonal church of San Vitale, home of the celebrated portrait panels of the emperor Justinian I and his wife, the notorious empress Theodora; the basilica church of S. Apollinare Nuovo decorated with spectacular processions of male and female saints, and with surprising evidence of its past life as the palace chapel of Ostrogoth King Theodoric; the basilica church of S. Apollinare in Classe featuring a magical starry sky apse mosaic; and the exquisite mosaic decoration of the cruciform oratory of imperial princess Galla Placidia.
Tuesday 9 December 2025
Imogen Corrigan: Jan van Eyck
One of the most famous pictures in London’s National Gallery is The Arnolfini Portrait painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434. No one is quite sure if it represents a wedding, a betrothal or even a commemoration. Many of van Eyck’s works are filled with symbolism which is one of the many joys of exploring them. Other works explore the superiority of paint over stone. Some of them, at a glance, appear to show astonishingly realistic sculptures, but closer inspection shows them to be painted. This lecture introduces the work of Jan van Eyck and examines some of his better-known pieces in all their painted glory.
Tuesday 13 January 2026
Toby Faber: T S Eliot and Art
As a pioneer of literary modernism, TS Eliot inevitably influenced his counterparts in the visual arts. Edward McKnight Kauffer and David Jones illustrated his work; Patrick Heron and Wyndham Lewis painted him; Jacob Epstein sculpted him. There are paintings inspired by his poems. And the reverse is also true; The Waste Land famously employs techniques borrowed from modern art. This lecture will explore some of those connections, while also taking the chance to display some of Eliot’s own artistic creations: the jokey little sketches he included in letters to children. Toby Faber was a banker and management consultant before becoming managing director of the publishing company founded by his grandfather, Faber & Faber. In this lecture he explores Eliot’s relationship with his grandfather and father, who was one of the children who received those letters.
Tuesday 10 February 2026
Anne Sebba: The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz:
A story of Music and Survival
Moving and powerful, this lecture tries to understand how music, the most sublime of all the arts, could possibly play a role in a death camp. It is also a vivid portrait of the women and girls from eleven nations who came together to form an orchestra in order to survive the horrors of Auschwitz. How could a motley band of young girls overcome differences and little musical knowledge to please the often sadistic Nazi overseers? Where did their instruments come from and how could they play in the cold, constantly hungry with hardly any music at their disposal. That they did demonstrates the triumph of the human spirit to survive.
10 March 2026
Caroline Shenton: National Treasures: Saving London’s Museums and Galleries in the Second World War
This is the gripping and sometimes hilarious story of how a band of heroic curators and eccentric custodians saved our national heritage during our Darkest Hour. As Hitler’s forces gathered on the other side of the Channel to threaten the UK, men and women from London’s national museums, galleries and archives forged extraordinary plans to evacuate their collections to safety. Utilising country houses from Buckinghamshire to Cumbria, tube tunnels, Welsh mines and Wiltshire quarries, a dedicated team of unlikely heroes packed up their greatest treasures in a race against time during the sweltering summer of 1939, dispatching them throughout the country on a series of secret wartime adventures, retold in this talk.
Edinburgh Decorative & Fine Arts Society 