FANI-MARIA TSIGAKOU – Art-Historian. After a B.A. in Archaeology she did a Ph. D. thesis in the History of Art at University College London. During 1980-2015 she worked at the Benaki Museum as Curator of the Department of Paintings, Prints and Drawings. Her specific research interest is the perception and image of Greece and the Greeks in European paintings , prints and in Travel-literature on Greece, from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Her book” The Rediscovery of Greece. Travelers and Painters of the Romantic Era”, Thames and Hudson, 1981( with an introduction by Sir Steven Runciman), is considered the basic reference work on the subject. A world specialist on the subject of “Images of Greece by foreign artists- travellers” and “Philhellenic iconography” she has published extensively on these topics and organized more than 170 exhibitions in Europe, The U.S.A, Australia and Japan.
“Ut Pictura Poesis: Byron’s Poetry vs. Byronic Iconography” UT PICTURA POESIS, meaning that AS PAINTING SO IS POETRY, an idea first stated in antiquity, that stimulated academic debate for many centuries, in the age of the Renaissance finally vindicated Painting. The issue I negotiate in my presentation is how can poetry be transformed into Painting, in reference to Philhellenic art works inspired by Byron’s poetry. The equation is a great challenge to the artist, because it demands sensitive images that reveal not only the deeper content of the verses, but also the poet’s intentions and feeling. Byron’s strongly visual descriptions of the landscape of Greece and his powerfully characterized dramatic heroes and heroines created a spectacular source of inspiration for the Romantic painters. Throughout the nineteenth century a considerable number of European Romantic art works attempted to bring to life the lines of Byron’s poems. However, few of them may be considered successful, because, to give a visual form to a poem is an achievement that goes beyond an artist’s creative ability of illustration.
JANE STABLER (University of St Andrews) – Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She is author of Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge 2002) and The Artistry of Exile: Romantic and Victorian Writers in Italy (Oxford 2013) and with Dr Gavin Hopps and Dr Matthew Ward is editor of The Complete Poems of Lord Byron for the Longman Annotated English Poets series. Volumes IV and V Don Juan should appear in May 2024.
‘“Time is—Time was—Time’s past”: Moments with the Pilgrim of Eternity’ In Canto I of Don Juan, Byron refers to The Famous History of Fryer Bacon (1661). The tale contains a moral about heeding timely warnings, but also conveys the uncanny way in which we experience the passing of time. This talk looks at the ways in which Byron plays with the reader’s experience of time in his poetry, particularly as it relates to the possibility of simultaneity. The talk grows out of thoughts on a passage in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (a novel in which Byron appears more than once): ‘For Macbeth’s rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite things in the same moment, referred to the clumsy necessities of action and not to the subtler possibilities of feeling. We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; but a moment is room wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp backward stroke of repentance’ (I iv). An exploration of Byronic ‘moments’ will follow.
ANDREW STAUFFER (University of Virginia) –Professor and chair of English at the University of Virginia and the President of the Byron Society of America. He is the author of Byron: A Life in Ten Letters (Cambridge, 2024) and the co-editor, with Jonathan Sachs of Lord Byron: Selected Writings for the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series (2023). Other recent publications include Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (U of Pennsylvania, 2021), which won the 2021 Marilyn Gaull Book Award from the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association, and a special issue of Studies in Romanticism, “Romantic Women and their Books,” co-ed with Michelle Levy (2021).
“Byron in Messolonghi, 1824-2024” Byron’s hundred-day residence in Messolonghi has been the subject of extensive biographical treatment, from the earliest publications by his companions in 1824 to the present day. In this talk, I will focus primarily on Byron the writer in Messolonghi, rereading the letters and poetry he composed from January to April 1824 in an attempt to characterize the conclusion of his literary career. In addition, I will discuss how the traces Byron left in Messolonghi have continued to come to light over the past two centuries, and how pilgrims to the Sacred City, following in Byron’s wake, have contributed to our sense of the poet and his work.