PHILADELPHIA -- Scholars from across the United States and Europe will visit the University of Pennsylvania for the second annual Coccia Centennial Celebration of Italian Culture, hosted by Penn's Center for Italian Studies.  The two-day conference, which is free and open to the public, will commence at 3 p.m., April 1, in the Terrace Room in Logan Hall.  

Papers will be presented on Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti's mural projects.

The two great Florentine artists belonged to different generations, and their careers barely intersected, yet, in the 16th century, they were each assigned to paint murals in the Great Council Hall of the Palace of the Signoria in Florence.  The painters spent months planning large compositions that, had they been completed, would have crystallized their different artistic priorities and approaches.  

Conference participants will discuss the artists' planned murals, surviving drawings, prints, paintings and other works and the role the Salone projects played in their careers and in the works of other artists they encountered.

Speakers will include Alessandro Cecchi, director of the Department of Medieval and Renaissance Painting at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; Carmen Bambach, curator of drawings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; Paul Johannides of Cambridge University; and Alison Wright from the University of London, among others.   

Further information about the conference is available at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/italians/events/cinquecento/program.html.