Making Sense of ‘Nature’ in Western Art
Online
Dr Thomas Balfe
5 pre-recorded lectures with 5 live Zoom seminars at 18:30 [London time], over 5 weeks from Thursday 24 April to Thursday 22 May 2025 with an optional course visit on Saturday 24 May 2025
£195 or £245 with visit
Course description
‘Truth to nature’ was the single most important principle governing Western visual arts from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century and beyond. It was artists’ role to imitate nature faithfully, and their education placed great importance on mastering the skills of drawing from ‘life’ and of making effective use of images from the real world that were stored in the mind or memory.
In practice, however, the relationship of the visual arts to nature was more complex and fraught than the rule of ‘truth to nature’ might suggest. What aspects of nature should the artist focus on? And what exactly was a truthful depiction? An unvarnished record of external appearances – or was there a higher, more perfect truth that the artist should seek to capture?
The unfamiliar animals, societies and places that Europeans encountered abroad raised further difficult issues since even lifelike images of these phenomena were generally unverifiable by their first audiences. Closer to home, technologies such as the microscope, telescope and camera obscura provided radically new ways of viewing nature, challenging existing artistic approaches to depicting the material world.
Our course will debate these and further questions which lie at the heart of our understanding of Western art, integrating close analysis of texts and objects by canonical figures such as Van Eyck, Vasari and Dürer with those of other important, now less familiar artists and writers.
How to book
To book your chosen course(s) please use the book now button below and you will be taken to our booking system where you can book and pay (Visa / Mastercard / GooglePay / ApplePay).
At checkout, you will be prompted to login (if you have previously booked gallery tickets) or to register and create a new account.
(Please note: this ticketing login is not the same as your Short Courses VLE login if you have one).
Please note that in the EU new VAT rules for online courses are coming into effect. This means that from 1 January 2025 we will be required to charge EU participants their local VAT rate. VAT-inclusive prices for EU students will be displayed at check-out.
If you have any questions please email us at short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk
Lecturer's biography
Dr Thomas Balfe is an art historian specialising in early modern (c.1550–c.1750) northern European easel painting and the graphic arts. His main research areas are seventeenth-century animal, hunting, fable, and food still-life imagery. His co-edited book on the term ad vivum and its relation to images made from or after the life was published in 2019. He is currently working on a long-term writing project that focuses on European depictions of hunting practices in the Americas, Asia, and the Arctic.