EXCLUSIVE WEBINARS | “Exclusive Webinars in November”

1. Thursday, November 6, 2025 | “Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona and the Universal Mission of Baroque Rome” with Dr. Paolo Alei | 2:00 – 3:00pm ET | 11:00am – 12:00pm PT | 7:00 – 8:00pm London
2. Thursday, November 13, 2025 | “4500 Years in Sicilian Art in 45 Minutes: A Guide to Sicilian Creativity” with Dr. Gary Radke | 2:00 – 3:00pm ET | 11:00am – 12:00pm PT | 7:00 – 8:00pm London
3. Thursday, November 20, 2025 | “The Other Botticelli: Filippino Lippi” with Dr. Rocky Ruggiero | **11:30am – 12:30pm ET | 8:30 – 9:30am PT | 4:30 – 5:30pm London** UPDATED TIMES

Each webinar will include a 45-minute lecture followed by 15-minutes of Q&A.

Please note:

• Your participation for all three exclusive webinars is confirmed once you have purchased your bundle. You will receive a reminder 24 hours before each event and the Zoom Link to join each presentation circa 30 minutes before the start time.
• VIDEO RECORDINGS of all of the exclusive webinars will be available for unlimited streaming at your convenience until November 27, 2025.

EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona and the Universal Mission of Baroque Rome” 
Presented by Dr. Paolo Alei

This webinar offers an exploration of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, commissioned by Pope Innocent X Pamphilj on the occasion of the Holy Year 1650, a sculptural and hydraulic masterpiece that transforms the square into a theatre of early modern global consciousness. At its center rises the Pamphilj obelisk, crowned by the dove with olive branch—the heraldic emblem of the Pamphilj family—and interpreted by the polymath Athanasius Kircher as a proclamation of Rome’s universal vocation. Around this cosmic axis, the four river gods—Danube, Nile, Ganges, and Río de la Plata—emerge as titanic personifications of the continents, their straining bodies and eloquent gestures binding distant geographies into a single papal realm. In this way, Bernini gives visual form to the Baroque dream of ordering the world, echoing Kircher’s encyclopedic vision of a Rome through which knowledge, faith, natural history, and the riches of the globe ceaselessly flowed—from obelisks once raised in Pharaonic Egypt to plants, animals, and minerals newly arriving from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The fountain thus becomes far more than an aesthetic triumph: it is a cartography in stone and water, a poetic dramatization of the yearning to gather the totality of the newly discovered world into a single, harmonious order. In tracing these symbolic currents, the webinar reveals how seventeenth-century Rome not only celebrated its own grandeur but actively shaped the very consciousness of a newly global age.

EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “4500 Years of Sicilian Art in 45 Minutes: A Guide to Sicilian Creativity”  
Presented by Dr. Gary Radke

Situated in the center of the Mediterranean, Sicily has seen human habitation and impressive artistic expression since prehistoric times.  From painting to mosaic to sculpture to architecture, Sicily offers an extraordinary range of masterpieces that both surprise and delight. Renew and expand your basic understanding of the characteristics of major eras in art history by seeing how Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern styles were expressed in Sicily’s unique multi-cultural environment.

EXCLUSIVE WEBINAR | “The Other Botticelli: Filippino Lippi”
Presented by Dr. Rocky Ruggiero