Making Sense of Key Concepts of Western Art

Making Sense of key concepts of Western Art: ‘Nature’, ‘Life’ and Lifelikeness

Dr Thomas Balfe
Delivered online
Monday 13 – Friday 17 September 2021
£195

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 using images drawn 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 categorical 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?

‘New’ types of nature – unfamiliar places, ‘exotic’ animals, and non-European societies – raised further difficult issues, because even lifelike images of these phenomena were generally unverifiable by their first audiences. Closer to home, new 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, incorporating the close analysis of texts and objects by canonical figures such as Van Eyck, Vasari and Dürer with those of other important, less familiar artists and writers.