Summer School 2021 – Online – July Courses

Monday 5 – Friday 9 July 2021

NEW Course 17

Carlo Crivelli and His Contemporaries: A Different Perspective on Fifteenth-Century Italian Art

Dr Amanda Hilliam

Lauded by the artist Audrey Flack as a “Gothic, Baroque Super-Realist” in 1981, the work of Carlo Crivelli (c.1430-95) resists straightforward categorisation. His paintings merge traditional techniques such as the gold ground with witty effects of pictorial illusion, and as such possess both ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ characteristics… Read more >

Course 18

The Baroque and its Rebels: Propaganda and Dissent in seventeenth-century Rome

Dr Giulia Martina Weston

The term ‘Baroque’ is traditionally associated with the Catholic Counter-Reformation and with Absolutist monarchies, and our course will begin by exploring the output of such giants of painting and sculpture as Caravaggio, Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini… Read more >

NEW Course 19

A Nervous State of Affairs: Art in Vienna, 1880-1938

Dr Niccola Shearman

As a tottering Austro-Hungarian Empire worked at its decorative façade and high society waltzed on regardless, new impulses were simmering beneath the surface in fin-de-siècle Vienna… Read more >

Course 20

Contemporary Chinese Art: Practices and Debates from 1989 to the Present

Dr Katie Hill

This course offers a survey of contemporary Chinese art starting with the backdrop to the first major contemporary exhibition held in Beijing in 1989, ‘China/Avant-garde’… Read more >

Monday 12 – Friday 16 July 2021

NEW Course 21

Gothic Images: The Art of Magnificence, 1200-1500

Dr Lydia Hansell

In the twelfth century, a dazzling new style of art and architecture flourished in Europe. The Gothic aesthetic that Vasari memorably dismissed as “endless pinnacles” pervaded visual culture, from precious gem-encrusted reliquaries, ivories, and illuminated manuscripts, to the stained glass of cathedrals, panel paintings, murals and monumental sculpture… Read more >

NEW Course 22

Acquisition and Assimilation: The Italians and Early Netherlandish Painting

Dr Paula Nuttall

Although famously disparaged by Michelangelo as being “without reason or art”, Netherlandish painting was widely admired in early Renaissance Italy, and had a transformative effect on Italian art itself… Read more >

Course 23

Idealists, Realists and the Avant-Garde: The Battle for Nineteenth-Century French Painting

Dr Lois Oliver

In a cartoon published in 1855, Honoré Daumier imagined a battle between two rival aesthetic schools in France: ‘Idealism’ appears as an ageing neoclassical nude, wearing an antique helmet, with his palette as a shield, heroically raising his mahlstick as a spear, to defend himself against ‘Realism’, a scruffy figure in rustic clogs, brandishing a small square palette and clumsy paintbrush… Read more >

NEW Course 24

[Cancelled] Power, Politics and Architecture: Palaces and Gardens in Mughal South Asia

Dr Mehreen Chida-Razvi

We regret that due to unforeseen circumstances this course has had to be cancelled.

How does architecture reflect power? This fundamental question is the theme running through this course, exploring the great palaces and gardens built by the emperors and courtly elite in South Asia during the Mughal era… Read more >

Monday 19 – Friday 23 July 2021

Course 25

Might and Munificence: Court Patronage in Renaissance Ferrara, Mantua, Rimini and Urbino

Dr Michael Douglas-Scott

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some of the most sophisticated courts of Europe were concentrated in a few small towns in north-eastern Italy. The most significant were at Ferrara, Mantua, Rimini and Urbino… Read more >

NEW Course 26

Beauty, Destruction and Resurrection: Art in England, 1500-1558

Dr Lesley Milner and Dr Michael Carter

At the turn of the sixteenth century England could boast some of the finest ecclesiastical art and architecture in Europe. Glorious cathedrals, monasteries and parish churches were home to the full panoply of late medieval religious art in all its splendour. Within half a century, the English landscape was populated with the ruins of the once mighty monasteries… Read more >

Course 27

Fathers of Modern Art: Manet and Cézanne

Dr Charlotte de Mille

For the French art historian and critic Louis Gonse, “Manet [was] a point of departure, the symptomatic precursor of a revolution”. For Picasso, “Cézanne was like the father of us all”… Read more >

NEW Course 28

Beyond the Brillo Box: Re-examining Pop Art 1947-1989

Dr Tom Day

This course questions the assumption that Pop Art is merely a celebration of everyday consumer products and popular culture.  Its techniques of immediacy and mimicry have certainly made it one of the most widely recognisable styles in art history… Read more >

Monday 26 – Friday 30 July 2021

Course 29

Venetian Painting in an Age of Crisis: Late Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and their Contemporaries

Dr Michael Douglas-Scott

By the 1540s Venice was undergoing revolutions occasioned by the spread of printing, and by religious dissent. In the company of the Florentine sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino and the critic, Pietro Aretino, Titian, who had been court painter to the Hapsburgs since the 1530s, dominated the local scene… Read more >

Course 30

Words and Images: The Power of Faith in the Age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation

Dr Matthias Vollmer

The Protestant Reformation caused unprecedented religious upheaval in the history of Western Christianity. The visual arts in particular had to take on a new role… Read more >

Course 31

Global Britain: Painting, Print Culture and Patronage, c. 1700-1800

Dr Kate Grandjouan

This course investigates the rich artistic legacies of the eighteenth century when British society, powered by the twin forces of imperial expansion and consumer revolution, was radically transformed… Read more >

NEW Course 32

Decolonising the Museum: International Perspectives on Colonial Legacies, Representation and Repatriation

MaryKate Cleary

This course examines how museums today grapple with the problematic legacies of colonialism and the political and economic exploitation out of which museum collections were formed, as well as the power structures which continue to govern display and interpretation practices… Read more >