NEW Built upon Waters: The Sea in Venetian art from Tintoretto to Canaletto

Dr Camilla Pietrabissa

Monday 6 – Wednesday 8 May 2024
£495

NB. All of our 2024 Study Tours have now taken place. Our new programmes for 2025 will be online in mid-December this year.  If you are not already on our mailing list, do contact short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk to join, so that you do not miss out when we launch the programmes.

Course description

Venice was built on the marshy waters of the Adriatic lagoon and grew to become a maritime empire on the Mediterranean Sea. This study tour centres on Venetian visual culture as a response to this aquatic environment between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.  We shall consider both the material evidence for the mercantile growth of Venice, but also the sensibility of writers, artists, and architects to the city-state’s fundamental connection to the element of water. Visual representations of the sea by Tintoretto, from his cycle for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, and Canaletto’s serial views of the Grand Canal are only two of many examples we shall see in situ and then discuss, perhaps over spritz while looking at the sunset on the lagoon.

Led by a lecturer resident in Venice, the tour will begin by taking vaporettos around the different viewing points of San Marco bay: the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Punta della Dogana, and the Piazzetta near the Molo. This spectacular area, conceived as a water-oriented scenography, will serve as an introduction to the notion of maritime visual culture. Museum visits will include the lesser-known Naval Historical Museum, with its collection of objects and artifacts from the naval industry, the Gallerie dell’Accademia, filled with masterpieces of Venetian painting, and the Ca’ Rezzonico, a palazzo holding one of the oldest gondolas in existence.