In This Issue
The Past and Pasta
Fine art prof embraces Italian history, art and food
BY DAVID DICENZO
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| Prof. Sally Hickson, a recently arrived art historian in the School of Fine Art and Music, isn't Italian by lineage, but she's enamoured with Italy's history, art, culture, language and food. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
Prof. Sally Hickson, Fine Art and Music, is Italian in spirit, if not by lineage. A specialist in Italian Renaissance and baroque art and history, she first went to Italy on a scholarship between her second and third undergraduate years at Carleton University. She spent the summer studying Italian at a university for foreign students in Perugia, an experience that would shape the path of her career.
Hickson, who has since enjoyed extended stays in Venice, Florence, Milan and Mantua and has taught a number of summer courses in Italy, still takes an annual trip to the European country, embracing the culture, food and, of course, the work produced by some of the world's most influential artists over centuries of time.
“I just love it there,” she says. “It's like I was supposed to be there. Someone once told me I had a Mediterranean temperament.”
Hickson is equally passionate about art and about teaching art history. She joined U of G this summer after teaching for three years at Brock University. There, she had a cross-appointment that involved teaching liberal and visual arts through a mix of literature, philosophy and theology — “everything from Homer to Toni Morrison,” she says.
“It was great for me, but I wasn't doing what I love to do, which is to teach art history.”
Here at Guelph, she's teaching a second-year Italian Renaissance course and a fourth-year seminar focusing on women patrons in the arts, subject matter that allows her to go into a lecture and simply speak from the heart.
In the winter, Hickson will lead a course called “The Art of Love: A History of Love and Its Representation From Plato to Shakespeare” as part of the University's special first-year seminars. She's intrigued by the idea of how love was expressed through art in the Middle Ages and the rituals associated with it. Through the texts of Plato and Ovid and the works of Botticelli, for example, it's possible to gain a better understanding of the whole culture built around love and expressions of love, she says.
Hickson plans to take a liberal arts approach to the course.
“It's a way of pointing out to students how you learn things, the process of how you acquire knowledge, how you investigate things, and how you look at things and figure them out. Received wisdom is great, but they have to learn how to be thinkers.”
Her own educational experience was much different, says Hickson, who jokes that she was “the victim of every form of educational experiment that went on in the 1970s.” She attended a high school where students worked at their own pace and was only 16 when she graduated. She went on to work at a public library in Ottawa for years before deciding to enrol at Carleton when she was 27.
Because of her general aptitude for languages, Hickson took up Italian. One of her professors, Claudia Persi-Haines, ended up playing a very influential role in Hickson's life.
“We would go shopping at the market Sunday morning and spend the whole day making a feast, speaking in Italian the whole time,” says Hickson. “She was very generous with her time and taught me how to be a teacher at the university level. She also taught me how to make pasta.”
Hickson has a great appreciation for Italian food, noting that focaccia and lemon risotto are two of her specialties. (Cooking also gives her a reason to take a trip down to Angelino's Italian market on Stevenson Street, one of her favourite places to visit since coming to Guelph.)
Her interest in Italian cuisine didn't emerge until her late 20s, but Hickson recalls being intrigued by art from a much earlier age. Once she got to Carleton — and later to Queen's University, where she was awarded a Bader Fellowship for her PhD work in art history — that interest grew, especially in Renaissance art.
“I'm very interested in the period,” she says. “For me, the history is as important as the art. People sometimes say this funny thing to me when I tell them I'm a Renaissance specialist. They say: 'What's new to learn about the Renaissance?' And I think: 'Well, everything.' It's how you interpret it. These are persistent images, and the question is, why are they so persistent in culture? Something like Michelangelo's David was a political symbol. People actually acted against it, threw rocks at it and broke off parts of the statue. It's that idea of the object as history.”
But Hickson admits that sometimes she's simply blown away by the beauty of a work.
“Really fabulous paintings can just transport you to somewhere else. Everybody has their idea of what is sublime in life, and for me, that's it.”