Autumn Term 2024:
30 September - 09 December (10 weeks)
Half term : Monday 28 October
Members: £135 Non-members: £170
Concessions: £20 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
This course looks at Italian Renaissance painting, sculpture and architecture from the start of the fourteenth century till the early sixteenth century. By looking at selected artists and their patrons, the course aims to place key artworks into their historical context.
Most histories of the Italian renaissance focus on Florence, where the patronage of the Medici resulted in a burst of creativity by artists, architects and sculptors such as Domenico Ghirlandaio, Andrea del Verrocchio, Filippo Brunelleschi, Botticelli and Michelangelo. Florence was, however, not the only artistic centre in the Italian renaissance. In this lecture series we will track the origins of renaissance naturalism back to the work of Giotto and the Roman Realists in the early fourteenth century. We will explore the art of mercantile Venice (Jacapo, Gentile, and Giovanni Bellini); the dukedoms of Mantua, Urbino and Milan (Andrea Mantegna, Piero Della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci); and Rome (Michelangelo and Raphael).
The best artists worked for patrons all over the peninsula, so our approach will be to examine the art of this period within a framework of different techniques and working practices; and by considering how different types of patrons wanted different kinds of art
What will we cover?
• How do we define ‘the renaissance’? What changes in this period?
• Fresco: Giotto, Roman Realism and the description of emotions
• Architecture: the rediscovery of Vitruvius and the influence of Classical Roman architecture
• Sculpture: the return to Classical ideals in bronze and marble
• Painting: Linear perspective, ideas from the north, and the transition from tempera to oil painting
• Different motifs: for churches and private chapels, portraits, stories from recent history and classical mythology
• Types of patron: homeowners, guilds, wealthy merchants, aristocrats, mercenary generals, church leaders and popes
• Places: Florence, Milan, Urbino, Borgo san Sepulcro, Venice, Rome etc.
Julia Musgrave
Julia has a masters in ‘Art, Style and Design: Renaissance to Modernism c.1450 - c.1930’ from the University of Glasgow. She gained her PhD at the University of York for her research into the social networks of the British art world in the development of the Contemporary Art Society from 1910 to 1939. She is an accredited Arts Society lecturer.
