Design: Grayson Perry, Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton

Turner Prize winning lecturer-du-jour Grayson Perry appears at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields this March alongside celebrated Early Modern historian Lisa Jardine and Renaissance studies Professor Jerry Brotton. 

This academically star-studded discussion is part of the pint-sized John Soane's Museum's Piranesi: Fantasy and Excess exhibition, exploring the design work of late Baroque printmaker, antiquarian and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

This talk,  Using Objects as Evidence of Themselves , sees Perry step up to the plate with his take on how we interpret designs and what they can tell us about their origins – working backwards, if you like, from finished 3D objects to the page on which their existence was first anticipated. It’s the latest talk in what’s been a packed six months for him - as  BBC Reith  lecturer in October and, most recently, headliner at the  Southbank Centre ’s  Festival of Being a Man . 

The exhibition - Diverse Maniere: Piranesi, Fantasy and Excess - sees the age-old debate of whether art can be truly reproduced hurled into the 21st century. Produced in collaboration with the visionary Spanish conservation initiative Factum Arte Collective, it showcases cutting-edge new realisations of a series of incredibly ornate object designs which Piranesi laboured over in his workbooks but never realised: coffee pots, chairs, chimneypieces, antique candelabra, tripods and altars that were dismissed rather uncharitably after his death as ‘grotesque without being useful or interesting… [and] nearly impossible to reproduce.’

Countering Perry’s zeitgeist-commentating approach with Renaissance-steeped takes are Jerry Brotton, who last year published the intense labour of cartographical love A History of the World in Twelve Maps , and BBC Radio 4 ’s Lisa Jardine – celebrated former Trustee of the world’s largest archive of design objects: the V&A .