Franke Program in Science & the Humanities

The Lost Leonardo is the inside story behind the Salvator Mundi, the most expensive painting ever sold at $450 million. From the moment the painting is bought for $1,175 at a shady New Orleans auction house, and the restorer discovers masterful Renaissance brushstrokes under the heavy varnish of its cheap restoration, the Salvator Mundi’s fate is determined by an insatiable quest for fame, money, and power. As its price soars, so do questions about its authenticity: is this painting really by Leonardo da Vinci?

Unravelling the hidden agendas of the richest men and most powerful art institutions in the world, The Lost Leonardo reveals how vested interests in the Salvator Mundi are of such tremendous power that truth becomes secondary.

After the film, we shall host a moderated conversation with Dianne Dwyer Modestini, the art conservator whose restoration of the Salvator Mundi is featured in the movie.

It was early spring, nearly 15 years ago, when Belen Delgado made the discovery of a lifetime. As a fisherman in rural Mexico, Belen had a hunch that a giant bank of Callo de Hacha, a rare and incredibly expensive shellfish, lay just off the shore of his small coastal town. Together with friends, he hired a diver to plunge 70 feet below the surface and when he emerged the diver confirmed Belen’s suspicion, “wherever you step,” he said, “there’s callo.” The colony of Callo de Hacha covered 30 miles of ocean floor and was worth millions of dollars. This was the financial windfall the town desperately needed, but Belen wasn’t prepared for the chaos and greed that soon followed as his fellow fishermen succumbed to the “White Gold Fever.” This story was produced for the podcast Snap Judgment in partnership with FERN, the Food and Environment Reporting Network. It explores overfishing, climate change and the limitation of government regulations when matched against the needs of people who are working to put food on the table.

Esther Honig worked her way into journalism and built her career reporting for public radio stations across the Midwest and Colorado. She began to focus on agriculture and farm labor during her time at Harvest Public Media, a regional reporting collaborative, where she frequently contributed to NPR news, covering the impacts of Trump’s trade wars and immigration policies. Now as an independent journalist she spends her time reporting internationally from Mexico and from her home in Denver. A fluent Spanish-speaker, Esther works in audio and print to tell stories about agriculture, U.S. immigration policy, climate change, and rural issues. Her work has been featured by The Nation, Mother Jones Magazine, NPR, and Latino USA. She is a 2021 recipient of the UC Berkeley 11^th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship.

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Poster

Social and Structural Contours of Marginalization in the Context of COVID-19
The Wisdom Project was born in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A group of persons with lived experience with mental health problems has produced a series of webinars and podcasts; and they have conducted research on how we can collectively make sense of this global disruption. This pandemic—far from being a great equalizer—has brought to the fore issues that are at the core of our societies and that we can no longer ignore—systemic racism, oppression, poverty, and health inequities. This talk will focus on a series of regional conversations that invited the voices and experiences of those who have experienced first-hand what it’s like to survive precarious livelihoods, racism, oppression, marginalization, stigma, and other unfreedoms.

We look forward to hosting this talk by former Franke Postdoctoral Fellow Ana Florence, now affiliated with Columbia University.

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Poster

Mapping as Knowing Lecture Series

The act of creating an inclusive and connective network of all musical practices—sung, played, written, and unwritten—quickly reveals flaws in the hierarchies and priorities that have largely mapped the geography of Early Modern music history. But such charting can also offer the chance for revision, that is, to move across the historically constructed (and still not outdated) boundaries of “central” and “peripheral” styles, “greater” and “lesser” composers, singular and plural modes of performance, notated and improvised practices, and the border between original compositions and their adaptations. In this talk, Professor Victor Coelho of Boston University proposes a more “polycentric” template for understanding music history between ca. 1420 and 1600, drawing on several case studies dealing with performance, sound, notation, and transmission as examples of why a history formed of many discrete parts with their individual stylistic constellations may be preferable to attempts at constructing a unified musical universe.

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Poster

Distinguished speaker series

In Life’s Edge, Carl Zimmer explores the nature of life and investigates why scientists have struggled to draw its boundaries. He handles pythons, goes spelunking to visit hibernating bats, and even tries his hand at evolution. Zimmer visits scientists making miniature human brains to ask when life begins and follows a voyage that delivered microscopic animals to the moon, where they now exist in a state between life and death. From the coronavirus to consciousness, Zimmer demonstrates that biology, for all its advances, has yet to achieve its greatest triumph: a full theory of life.

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Poster