Courtauld summer school day 5

The week has gone so fast! You just get a rhythm and routine and it’s over!

The morning’s lectures begin with looking at the landscape tradition in the Italian and German Renaissance. It looked at how the practice of landscape came from the Netherlands to Italy and then fed into Germany. We saw how in Germany there was a culture of representing the forest and discussed the allegory of this.

The second lecture took the same area and period and looked at portraits. Again the Netherlands led the way but we looked in detail at how Venice developed this tradition. We discussed the social changes which were reflected by the growth in portrait painting.

The afternoon trip was the National Gallery where we looked at the wonderful set of Cranachs there moving on to the Holbeins and the Altdorfers what may be the first landscape study in art. We then looked at the Italian side concentrating on the Titians.

So what have I learn this week? Sadly that I’m not sure I like German art! I now understand it better but it doesn’t move me. I did learn to distinguish between Netherlandish Northern Europe which I love and Germanic. They are very different traditions.

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