UWA Extension

The Gut Brain Connection: How Gut Health Affects Wellbeing

Did you know we are essentially more bacteria than human? – and the microbes in our guts are responsible for 90% of the messaging to our brain rather than brain to gut! Science is beginning to catch up to the crucial impact our gut microbes have on our digestion, overall health and mental well being. In the last few years huge advancements in technology used to measure and detect the microbes that live on and in us has allowed researchers to map and track the diversity and the... [More]

This course has no current classes. Please the waiting list.

The History of Avant-garde Art

The course explores the evolution and social significance of avant-garde art, from its inception in the early 20th century through to the present day. Beginning in Northern Italy – the birthplace of Futurism – the course will travel through time and space, visiting France, Germany, Russia, Japan and United States. Finally we return to present-day Perth, the home of one of the ground-breaking contemporary creative practice of Bio-art, to consider what exactly is meant by the... [More]

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The Insider's Guide to Renaissance Rivals: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian brought out the best in each other… and the worst. This lecture views the lives and greatest works of the foremost Renaissance masters through the prism of their ardent rivalry. These Renaissance superstars passionately strived to outdo both living competitors and the masters of antiquity. Who would have thought that the serene masterpieces of the High Renaissance owed so much of their vitality to backstage brawling? This lecture will... [More]

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The Insider's Guide to the Baroque Underworld: Vice and Destitution in Rome

This lecture will reveal the insolent dark side of Baroque Rome, its slums, taverns, places of perdition. An ‘upside down Rome’, tormented by vice, destitution, all sorts of excesses that underlie an amazing artistic production, all of which left their mark of paradoxes and inventions destined to subvert the established order. This lecture presents this neglected aspect of artistic creation at the time of Caravaggio and Claude Lorrain’s Roman period, unveiling the clandestine face... [More]

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The Insider's Guide to: Fate of the missing masterpieces -DEFERRED DATE -

DEFERRED DATE - please check your email for more information Imagine a museum of lost art. It would contain more objects than all of the world’s museums combined. Only a modest percentage of the artworks created through the ages survive intact today. Some vanished masterpieces are definitely gone: consumed by fire, destroyed by iconoclasts, or fed to pigs. But what stirs the imagination are not the definitive tragedies of artifacts known to have been ruined, but the stories of... [More]

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The Insider's Guide to: Florence circa 1500

After the French invasion in 1494, the Florentine people revolted against its de facto rulers and exiled the Medici family from Florence. Subsequently, the followers of the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola (called piagnoni: weepers) instituted a theocratic government, taking fierce control over the city, while Savonarola was preaching the end of times and called for a large ‘bonfire of the vanities’ to ‘cleanse’ the city. Savonarola’s disgust of splendour is famous, but what... [More]

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The Insider's Guide to: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa

What has made the Mona Lisa the most famous picture in the world? Why is it that, of all the 6,000 paintings in the Louvre, it is the only one to be exhibited in a special box, set in concrete and protected by two sheets of bulletproof glass? Why do thousands of visitors throng to see it every day, ignoring the masterpieces which surround it? For nearly 500 years the painting – and the mysterious smile on the face of the sitter has been a source of mystery, speculation and... [More]

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The Insider's Guide to: Love and Beauty in Italian Renaissance Art

The subjects of love, beauty, and attraction mesmerized Renaissance men and women. Love can bring pleasure or pain and beauty can inspire lascivious thoughts or bring us closer to the divine. The great Renaissance paintings on the themes of love and marriage owe their rich complexity, and often ambiguity, of meaning to the existence of a broad range of contemporary thought on love and beauty. This lecture will discuss artworks by famous masters, such as Botticelli, Leonardo, and... [More]

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The Insider's Guide to: Treasured Cargo of the Batavia- rubbish worth millions

Before dawn on the morning of June 4, 1629, the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia struck a reef at the Abrolhos Islands, some 70 kilometres off the Western Australian coast. More than seven months earlier the ship had left the Netherlands to make its way to the city of Batavia (present-day Jakarta), carrying silver, gold and jewels and 341 passengers and crew. During the shipwreck, 40 of them drowned. The others found safety on a nearby island, but had to fear for their lives... [More]

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The Insider’s Guide to: Bernini, Borromini and the rivalry that transformed Rome

The rivalry between seventeenth-century Italian architects Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini is legendary. Possessed of enormous talent and ambition, these two artists met as contemporaries in the building yards of St Peter’s in Rome and ended their lives as bitter enemies. Over the course of their careers they became the most celebrated architects of their era and transformed the city of Rome with the most beautiful buildings and spectacular designs. This lecture tells... [More]

This course has no current classes. Please the waiting list.

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