The Classical World and Classical Revivals

Fabulous ten week course at the Victoria and Albert Museum on classicism looking both at its roots in the ancient world and how later generations used and developed it.

I have been meaning to do a V&A course for ages but, as they are quite long, I don’t get a chance as usually one holiday or another breaks into them. However this Autumn I was grounded after Italy in the summer so I took the opportunity to do this and it was great! While in Rome I’d become fascinated by the ancients remains there and what different artists would have seen at various periods of art history so this was just the course I was looking for.

We had some excellent speakers. I’d heard David Bellingham before at the National Gallery and he is a very engaging speaker. I was impressed by the range of dates he could talk about doing talks on Roman emperors and how they showed their power, how Renaissance artists used classical sculpture, a detailed look at Botticelli’s Venus and Mars and then reappearing later on to talk about nature and the ideal in the neo-classical period. I’d also mention Steve Kershaw who talked about collectors and discoveries in the neo-classical period.

The most enlightening talk was by Barrie Singleton in the fifth week when he looked at classism in the Dark Ages. I had assumed that although people were living with what had been left by the Roman Empire that they had mainly used it as building materials rather than being influenced artistically by it but he showed us some wonderful objects with classical sources. I hadn’t come across the Easby Cross before which is in the V&A. Made is Yorkshire in about 800 AD it shows the apostles in the guise of Roman officials and carved in deep relief like a Roman sarcophagus. He also talked us through two 7th century psalter pictures of St Luke made in Northumberland which indicate that the monastery which made them had access to a Roman original version of the image.

We also spent some sessions in the V&A galleries including a good afternoon looking at the classical influences in the Raphael cartoons and using the cast gallery to look at the sculpture of Michelangelo.

I wish I’d had time to review this week by week as there was so much in it! I can’t wait to sign up to another course! 

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