Stories of art Module 2 : Renaissance painting 1500-1600

Fifth session in a six week course at the National Gallery on Renaissance painting which focused this week on form and function.

The first lecture was given by the course tutor Sian Walters and looked at art in Venice in this period and how the state used art to show its political harmony and civil concord. Paintings she used from the gallery’s own collection to show this including “Jsutics” by Salviati, Titian’s Vendramin family portrait and Veronese’s wonderful “Family of Darious before Alexander”. In each case she talked us through how they demonstrated the joint role of state and family.

The second lecture was by Patrick O’Sullivan, Head of Art Handling, at the gallery who talked us through how the department moved the great Piombo altarpiece and why it was such a difficult job. He also showed a wonderful film of them doing it made for training purposes. It was speeded up footage to a jaunty sound track and while being very interesting was also very funny. He have a wonderful dryly witty live commentary!

 

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