From the satirical barbs of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511) to the urbane games of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528), wit was a serious subject in the Renaissance, addressed in natural philosophy and medicine as the intellective part of the human soul, in artistic theory as the wellspring of creativity, and in criticism as one of the most important markers of authorial voice. Yet wit’s visual fortunes in the period have barely been explored.

Visual wit was a kind of pictorial ingenuity, through which artists sought to rebut the humanist claim that by imitating nature they were merely replicators, not inventors. Hans Holbein the Younger, in particular, engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare with the humanists he knew and portrayed, including Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, appropriating their ingenious techniques of ambiguity, self-contradiction, and disguise in a playful contest between painting and poetry.

This series of lectures will trace visual wit in Holbein’s hands, as he evoked breath, voice, and brain through cunning conceits such as More’s ambivalent half-smile and Erasmus’s keen nose. In so doing, we will touch on some major themes in sixteenth-century culture: the complex nature of ‘character’; disputes over biological and artistic parentage; the paradox of lively death; and the vexed relationship between the thinking mind and skilled hand.

Dr Alexander Marr FSA is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity Hall, and President of Leonardo da Vinci Society. His most recent book is Rubens's Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius, (2021).

There are traces of violence and warfare from the earliest periods of human history, and by the Classical era wars were common events and, along with politics, became the major concern of historians. Greeks defeated Persian invasions, then fought each other. Alexander swept through the Persian empire. Rome and Carthage waged war on an immense scale, and at the end of it the Carthaginian Republic was eradicated. Rome created and maintained through military force an empire embracing much of the known world.

Wars were important and shaped the development of the ancient world, but how should we understand them? Battles were major events, sometimes deciding wars, and were clearly important and need to be understood. Yet there was a lot more to ancient warfare than pitched battles, and it is vital to look at the attack and defence of fortified settlements and strongholds, and at lower level raids and skirmishes. The story of warfare in the Greek and Roman worlds is not simple, but remains of fundamental importance for understanding the era.

Adrian Goldsworthy is an historian and novelist who specialises in ancient Roman history. His most recent work is The Eagle and the Lion: Rome, Persia and an Unwinnable Conflict, which was published in 2023