Event Details
Wed, October 29, 2025
18:00 – 19:30
VILLA SASSETTI
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Florence, Italy
A talk by Stevan Weine, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, University of Illinois Chicago
Introduced by Carl Brandon Strehlke, Curator Emeritus, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, drew inspiration, imagery, and ideas from Fra Angelico at a key moment in his development and writing, leading to “Kaddish”, widely regarded as his masterpiece.
The “single vast beam” in the first line of “Kaddish” brings to mind none other than Fra Angelico, who is name-checked in 1958’s “Mescaline”, and his famous Annunciation painting which hangs in the Prado, where Allen saw it in late 1957, causing him to have a return of his visions. Allen drew a cartoon facsimile for his brother and called it ‘The greatest painting I have ever seen’. In this Annunciation, the sun’s beam crosses first over the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve have sinned, and into the portico where it finds the Madonna. Fra Angelico’s Annunciation offered Allen an artistic model for a way of telling a tale which interweaves darkness and light, sin and redemption, death and rebirth, and the spiritual and human dimensions of life. Allen had a genius for integrating centuries old art with modern experience, and couldn’t have found a better master than Fra Angelico.
* Annunciation, tempera on panel by Fra Angelico, ca. 1426, Museo del Prado
As part of Museum Meetings Fall 2025
Featured Biographies
Stevan M. Weine M.D.
DIRECTOR, GLOBAL MEDICINE; DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR GLOBAL HEALTH; PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, COLLEGE OF MEDICINE
Dr. Weine is Professor of Psychiatry at the UIC College of Medicine, where he is also Director of Global Medicine and Director of the Center for Global Health. For 30 years he has been conducting research both with refugees and migrants in the U.S. and in post-conflict countries, focused on mental health, health, and violence prevention. His research mission is to develop, implement, and evaluate psychosocial interventions that are feasible, acceptable, and effective with respect to the complex real-life contexts where at-risk populations live. This work has been supported by multiple grants from the NIMH, NICHD, DHS, NIJ, and other state, federal, and private funders, all with collaboration from community partners. This work has resulted in more than 130 publications and three books: When History is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Rutgers, 1999); Testimony and Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence (Northwestern, 2006), and Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness (Fordham, 2023). He has been awarded two Career Scientist Awards: “Services Based Research with Refugee Families” from the National Institute of Mental Health and “Labor Migration and Multilevel HIV Prevention” from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Dr. Weine is the 2020 recipient of the Abraham L. Halpern Humanitarian Award of the American Association for Social Psychiatry and the 2023 recipient of the Piergiorgio L.E. Uslenghi Global Engagement Faculty Award.