The Pharos Monday Lectures for Spring 2026

Lecture 1: The Sound of Music in Ancient Greece

Lecture 2: Archimedes’ Eureka

Lecture 3. Catullus and his Lesbia

Lecture 4. Aspasia, Teacher of Socrates

It is sometimes thought that answers to big questions in classics are either known or beyond solution - questions such as what Greek music sounded like, or the true identity of Catullus’s Lesbia. In this series Prof Armand D'Angour will address four such questions and show that even today it’s possible to provide new and convincing answers to problems that many scholars had given up on.

Armand d'Angour is Professor of Classics and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. His work has ranged across wide areas of Greek culture, especially music and lyric poetry. His works include Socrates in Love (Bloomsbury 2019) and How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking (Princeton 2021).

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).

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).