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Announcing the
Dante Alighieri Society’s
February English & Italian Meetings
Wednesdays, February 10 & 24, 2021
Zoom room opens at 7:00
Presentations begin at 7:30
English Meeting, February 10
The Innocents at Home
presented by Rob Prufer
The Innocents at Home explores Florence’s remarkable Renaissance institution, the Hospital of the Innocents. We’ll trace its life from its creation as a civic orphanage in the early 15th century all the way up to its associated institutions today. We’ll investigate the story of its founding patron and attempts by directors through the centuries to secure adequate funding by commissioning art for the orphanage. And of course we’ll appreciate the remarkable architecture by Brunelleschi and the darling terra cottas by the della Robbia family.
In addition to his day job teaching art history and history at Newport H.S. in Bellevue, Rob Prufer used to lecture on art history in the community, particularly at Dante and the Bellevue Arts Museum’s Loggia Lecture Series. Since the pandemic, however, adapting education to a remote environment has been all-consuming. The Innocents at Home was the last art history project he created, a whirlwind effort in March and April as an expression of gratitude to all the healthcare workers in our community.
Italian Meeting, February 24:
Venice and the establishment of printing in Italy in the late 15th Century
presented by Marta Bernstein
Even though movable type was “invented” in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg, the design of books and letters — typefaces — were perfected in Italy in the last quarter of the 15th Century. Venice at the time was the «Silicon Valley» of Europe, the perfect place for a new technology to develop. We will talk about German emigrants, French punch-cutters and visionary Venetian merchants that still influence the fonts we use and the books we read today.
Designer and researcher originally from Milan, Marta Bernstein is currently associate creative director at Studio Matthews (Seattle) and lecturer at USC Roski (Los Angeles). Type and typography are her true passions and the common threads of all her projects. She has a soft spot for 19th-century type, a topic she has been researching for a decade and presented at various international type conferences. She has been involved in teaching graphic design, typography and type design on a regular basis since 2007 in universities and design schools in Europe, USA and China. She completed her B.Sc. & M.Sc. in Graphic Design at Politecnico di Milano and her M.Des in type design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL).
Zoom invitation links will be sent one day
ahead of these meetings.
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