The Courtauld Study Tours 2021 – Online

Introduction

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, we converted our sought-after programme of international art history study tours into online travel ‘essays’.

Our 2020 virtual journeys to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Mantua, to Belle Époque Brussels and to early twentieth-century Munich replaced the physical experience of travel abroad with an extended, unhurried exploration of the wider cultures in which these places and their treasured works of art and architecture existed.   ‘Travelling’ in this way allowed us to explore what is no longer visitable: once-famous buildings, squares and gardens that have since been demolished or are inaccessible to the public, and more importantly still, the vanished cultures of the past.  Our tours considered urban spaces, buildings, gardens, paintings and sculpture within the context of their contemporary court cultures and artistic milieux, literature, poetry and music.

Lectures and contextual materials were provided several days in advance of the tours, and enabled a deeper immersion in the past than is perhaps possible during a busy week-end ‘on location’.

In 2021, we shall run our successful online tours to Mantua, Brussels and Munich again, and extend our programme to include a visit to early twentieth-century Paris as a haven for avant-garde Russian artists, and another to the museums, galleries, happenings and streets of New York, the city that replaced Paris as the centre of the international art world.

Most poignantly, we shall journey imaginatively into the past and present of the great and now ravaged Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus that were once bywords for the peaceful, cosmopolitan co-existence of different cultures and religions.

We shall retain our online journeys beyond the current crisis, as an enrichment and alternative to the in-person trips we look forward to taking again from 2022.