Two hundred and fifty years after Antonio Stradivari’s death, his violins and cellos remain the most highly prized instruments in the world. Loved by great musicians and capable of fetching fabulous sums when sold, their tone and beauty are legendary. Every subsequent violin-maker has tried to match them. Not one has succeeded. How can that be? This lecture explores that central mystery by following some of Stradivari’s instruments from his workshop to the present day. It is a story that travels from the salons of Vienna to the concert halls of New York, and from the breakthroughs of Beethoven’s last quartets to the first phonographic recordings. 

Toby Faber is an experienced lecturer and public speaker who has been accredited by The Arts Society since 2012. His career began with Natural Sciences at Cambridge and has been through investment banking, management consulting and five years as managing director of the publishing company founded by his grandfather, Faber and Faber, where he remains on the board. He is also non-executive Chairman of its sister company, Faber Music and a director of Liverpool University Press. Toby has written three narrative histories: Stradivarius – Five Violins, One Cello and a Genius; Faberge’s Eggs; and Faber & Faber – The Untold Story, as well as a novel, Close to the Edge. Of these, only the obvious one is published by the family firm.

This is a whistlestop tour of major artworks, key themes, important ideas and stylistic changes in Modern and Contemporary art from the late 1800s to today to serve as an introduction to the myriad of styles in art in the 20th century. 

Sarah Ciacci has an MA in History of Art (Late 19th century French Painting and 20th Century Art) from University College London. She has been a Blue Badge Guide for London since 2008, specialising in art, museums and galleries.  Since 2008 she has trained Blue Badge Guides in the National Gallery and is an art lecturer for trainee guides in Tate Britain, Tate Modern and for a period in the National Portrait Gallery. From 2008-2023 she was Adjunct Faculty at Richmond University teaching the History of British Art, the History of Museums in London and the History of London. She is a gallery educator and runs regular courses and independent lectures on a variety of art historical periods.    

Few people nowadays give more than a second thought to their clocks: practical, sometimes beautiful, devices that form the background noise of our daily lives.  This talk explores the visual and literary uses of the clock, the varied meanings it could hold throughout the ages: as an ominous symbol of oncoming death, but also as a metaphor for the soul, for capitalism, and for the good use of time. Consideration will be given to medieval manuscripts and frescoes, poetry, still life and genre paintings, and satires by Jonathan Swift and Hogarth. We will consider nineteenth-century ideas about power and the working day, in portraits of emperors and seamstresses and novels by Dickens. 

Christina Faraday FSA FRHistS is an historian of art and ideas, specialising in Tudor and Stuart Britain and the wider 16th and 17th-century world. She is a Research Fellow in History of Art at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, a Trustee of the Walpole Society for British art history, and a BBC New Generation Thinker, appearing regularly on BBC Radio 3 and in other popular media. She is an experienced lecturer, and teaches for the History of Art Department at the University of Cambridge, The Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, London, and for the Institute for Continuing Education, Cambridge, where she is Co-Director of the MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture. Her first book, Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England, was published in 2023 by the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press. Her second book, The Story of Tudor Art, was published in 2025.
 

Please note that we will pause for a two minute silence during this lecture.