Courtauld summer school day 3

Today’s lectures were excellent. As one fellow student said “At last we’ve left religion and found sex!”!

We began with the mysterious Giorgione who we know very little about and who only left a handful of pictures as he died young, however what he did leave was remarkably significant and seemed to introduce a new style of pastoral art to Venice. We tried analysing some of the more mysterious pictures but who knows what they mean.

After coffee was Titian with particular emphasis on the mythological series. The themes in these became more and more racy. In one series he seems to have admitted that one of the reasons for the figures in them was to show naked women from all angles!


The trip this afternoon was the Print Gallery at the British Museum which I always enjoy. We were able to look at Gentile Bellini’s drawing for the big procession in St Marks Square, a Ttitan drawing, two Carpaccios, a Veronese and a Tintoretto. It is so nice to be able to compare style and technique that closely.

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