CO.AS.IT., ANZAMEMS and Società Dante Alighieri invite you to the book launch of
Giorgione, Dante and the Sydney Incunable, edited by Jaynie Anderson and John Gagné
To be launched by Professor Andrea Rizzi, Cassamarca Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Melbourne and Dr Christopher R Marshall, Associate Professor in Art History and Curatorship at the University of Melbourne.
Tuesday 2 December 2025, 6.30–8 pm, CO.AS.IT., 199 Faraday Street, Carlton.
Free event. Registration required here:
https://www.coasit.com.au/anderson-2025
This event will be broadcast live and recorded via Zoom. Passcode: 690410 To join:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87834963806?pwd=abLuqPcbVa80TOh1OGzbzXk1e4eofF.1#success
While preparing for an event at the University of Sydney in 2017, a librarian turned to the back page of the library’s 1497 copy of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and made a curious discovery. In red chalk was a drawing of a woman and baby, and an inscription in Italian: “On the day of 17th September, Giorgione of Castelfranco, a very excellent art-ist, died of the plague in Venice at the age of 36 and he rests in peace.” This discovery would shine the international art history spotlight on Sydney and begin a project that has seen state-of-the-art imaging techniques used alongside good old-fashioned archival research in a quest for answers. Was the drawing on the endpaper actually by Giorgione? Was Dante his inspiration? Do we have for the first time the dates of Giorgione’s birth and death? How should we re-imagine Giorgione’s chronology? And how did this early edition of the Divine Comedy end up in Sydney? Bringing together scholars from art history, Italian studies, librarianship and book history from Sydney to the Vatican, Giorgione, Dante and the Sydney Incunable tells the story of the provenance and significance of this remarkable discovery.
Jaynie Anderson is Professor Emeritus in Art History at the University of Melbourne. She was the first woman Rhodes Fellow at Oxford, where she lectured until 1991, Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, and president of the International Committee for Art History. Anderson was co-curator of Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting at the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna in 1986 and received a knighthood from the President of the Republic of Italy for her distinguished research on Venetian Renaissance art.
John Gagné is Cassamarca Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Milan Undone (Harvard University Press, 2021), co-editor with Stephen Bowd and Sarah Cockram of Shadow Agents of Renaissance War (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), and co-author with Timothy McCall of Fabric of War (Cambridge University Press, 2025). His research has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Sixteenth Century Journal, Art History, and I Tatti Studies in the Renaissance.
This event is held in conjunction with the fifteenth biennial conference for ANZAMEMS (Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies): Possibilities, at the University of Melbourne from 3–5 December 2025.
☛ To secure your copy of Giorgione, Dante and the Sydney Incunable at the special price of $45, email Georgia at
bXVwLWNvbnRhY3QgfCB1bmltZWxiICEgZWR1ICEgYXU= by 25 November 2025. Bring proof of purchase and your copy will be provided on the night. Copies can also be purchased at the event for RRP $55.
Image: Inscription in Italian: “On the day of 17th September, Giorgione of Castelfranco, a very excellent artist, died of the plague in Venice at the age of 36 and he rests in peace” on the back page of the 1497 copy of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in the library of the University of Sydney. Photograph supplied.
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