Friday Links, September 25, 2020

Seminar on Endo's The Samurai; the first woman to paint The Last Supper; a new poetry review.

The Samurai:Endō's Search for Christ in Japan and Beyond

This seminar is the first of three in the series "Writing Between Cultures: A Virtual Campus Seminar."  Over four weeks, participants in this seminar will read The Samurai by Shūsaku Endō and discuss aspects of the novel with two Endō scholars, Van C. Gessel of Brigham Young University and the translator of The Samurai into English, as well as John T. Netland of Union University. The concluding session will consist in an open discussion of what has been learned about the text. The seminar will be held via Zoom from 7:00pm–8:30pm over the course of four Thursday evenings: October 1, 8, 15, and 22.

Sister Plautilla Nelli, the Forgotten Woman Painter of the Renaissance

The above-linked article from the National Catholic Register is about Sister Plautilla Nelli, who was a self-taught artist, a religious sister, and a prioress who ran an important painting workshop in her Santa Caterina convent in Renaissance Florence. She was in her late 30s in 1560 when she created a monumental painting of the The Last Supper—measuring 22 feet by 7 feet—on commission for the refectory of Santa Maria Novella, a major Florentine church.

This painting was so deteriorated it was in storage for 450 years, until it was restored over a four year period with funds from Advancing Women Artists, an American not-for-profit organization—which has been identifying and restoring art works done Nelli and other Tuscan women artists. Restoration of The Last Supper painting was completed in 2019 and the painting was rehung at the old refectory, which is now part of the Museum of Santa Maria Novella.

Trinity House Review

From Katy Carl, Dappled Things Editor-in-Chief, "Of interest to our readers!"

“We are a new journal of poetry from the perspective of Christian faith focused on expressing what is good and true and beautiful about the profundity of human life. . . .Send us poems that show us something about ourselves and the world that is worth worship––poetry with force and urgency behind its composition. . . . We realize sometimes that the boldest thing one can do with a poem is embrace the mystery of form. We realize too that not all poetry arrives to the poet in meter. We want both. Explain with power what traditional forms can and cannot do, but please do not send us chaos.”