Stories of art Module 2 : Renaissance painting 1500-1600

Second session in a six week course at the National Gallery on Renaissance painting which focused on how paintings were produced and how science can help us find this out.

The first lecture was given by Gill Hart, Head of Adult Learning at the gallery and looked at under drawings and their role. There was nice emphasis on Raphael, linking to the second talk, and examining different pictures and infra red scans of them to look at Raphael’s technique. I loved the fact the pounced cartoon for the galleries Allegory still exists.

The second talk was by Ashok Roy, Head of Collections at the gallery, who talked about the work he had done in the galleries laboratory when he was head of science to help to authenticate Raphael’s “Madonna of the Pinks” by analysing the paint. It was interesting to hear that he had been unable to take samples from the picture as the gallery did not own it at the time and had to use others methods instead. I was also interested to hear when different pigments and come in and out of use.
 

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