Who are we

Bertel Thorvaldsen, “A genio lumen“, plaster. 50,5 x 66,5 cm, Plaster. 50,5 x 66,5 cm. © Thorvaldsen Museum, Inv. nr: A517

The project “A genio lumen” has been named in honor of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s masterpiece,

Among our tasks as Invited Lecturer at the Faculty of Archaeology of the University of Warsaw (summer semester A.y. 2020-2021), we had to teach two seminars and coordinate a workshop (30 academic hours each):

– the first (dedicated to English-Curriculum 3rd yead MA students) was devoted to Typologies of Ancient Lamps, from the Phoenician to Islam.

– the second (dedicated to English-Curriculum 1st yead BA students) was devoted to The Iconography of Ancient Lamps, from the Hellenistic Period to the Late Roman period.

– the workshop, due to the pandemic situation, could not take place as per agreement in the storerooms of the National Museum in Warsaw. Hence, after consultation, all participants (MA and BA + one PhD student) desired and agreed to follow another methodology, keeping intact the aims of the courses (= all skills to be learned by following the workshop as written in the syllabus) while adding additional skills, i.e the learning of web-basics and the making of each personal homepage you will discover in this website.

They learned how to acquire or perfect:

  1. CERAMOLOGIC SKILLS : courses dedicated on how to measure and which dimensions have to be taken in function of different lamp types and how to make a clay, slip and general shape scientific description.
  2. FOTOGRAPHY SKILLS : courses were dedicated to show the good use of the most advanced technologies : how to take color standardized CMYK 1:1 scale pictures of a lamp (they all tried with a mug or any clay object) with the right tools : light positioning, camera positioning, how to use the Colorcheck© by Pantone© color table as well as its dedicated software enabling to adjust the colors of the picture taken to the real colors of the lamp).
  3. WEBSITE MAKING SKILLS : special courses allowed the students to learn from zero to build their own WordPress Website, to secure it, to use it for their public professional image but also as private secured cloud, e-mail server and social media feeder.
  4. ON THE WEBSITE you discover today , each student learned to create and publish the three main steps of a lamp study:
    1. To write a technical study (photography, dimensions, clay & slip characteristic, short description of the morphology of the lamps chosen.
    2. To write a scientific essay on the lamps chosen with bibliography.
    3. To make a short and attractive resume of the study, understandable for the general public (for using it as an abstract, as a museum panel, as a publication within a daily newspaper quarter page).

      We wish you a nice “surfing” on each personal mini-site and its contents!

Prof. Univ. Dr. Habil. Laurent Chrzanovski
In charge of Roman and Late Roman Archaeology and History
“Lucian Blaga” State University of Sibiu
Doctoral and Postdoctoral School