Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting day of lectures from London Art History Society held at Friend’s House on the reaction against Modernist art by the dictators of the inter war years. Richard Humphreys organised the talks by country starting with an overview of what was happening at the centre of the avant-garde in Paris. We tend to concentrate on the major modern movements which started there like Cubism and Surrealism but Humprey’s looked at the reaction against these movements often led by the right wing and nationalism. He then used this discussion of the reaction to lead to talks on Italy and Mussolini, Russia and Stalin and Germany and Hitler where similar themes and subjects emerged such as the role of technology and how it represented in art, the desire to memorialise and use the history of the countries and the propaganda use of art. Because of the similar themes the country talks became a bit repetitive so I wonder if it might have been better to arrange it by theme, flagging what was happe...

Excellent study day organised by the London Art History Society as the last in a series on early Italian art focusing on lesser-known fresco cycles. Other study days in this summer series had looked at specific cities but this final session swept up other art which wasn’t in those three major centres. We also had a different lecturer for this session and Clare Ford-Wille took us on a lovely tour of Northern Italy and added lots of towns to add to my list of places I want to visit. Most interesting was her tour of the abbey at Pomposa which I had not come across before. Various abbots had commissioned cycles to promote the church. Sadly none of the artists are known but there seems to have been a fashion for depictions of the Last Supper at circular tables. We then looked at cycles in Padua which are overshadowed by the amazing work by Giotto which we had studied in the previous session. We started with the work of Giusto da Menabuoi in Baptistery commissioned by Fina B...

Fascinating study day organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House focusing on the role of Sienna in Early Italian Art. This was the fifth day in a series on this early period of Italian art and this time focused on the art of Florence and in particular at the role of Giotto.     John Renner, the lecturer, started by looking art in Florence before Giotto including going thought the art and architecture of the Baptistery in some detail and works by Cimabue. We then spent a delightful hour looking at Giotto’s masterpiece, the Arena Chapel in Padua, in detail. As ever John had wonderful, high quality images which were almost better than being there! I loved the section where he went through the sequence of images of Joachim and Anna which included the beautiful detail used for this article. In the afternoon we went on to look at the work of that Giotto did in Florence from Virgin and Child pictures to the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapels in Santa Cr...

Fascinating study day organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House focusing on the role of Sienna in Early Italian Art. This was the fourth   day in a series on this early period of Italian art and this time focused on the art of Sienna.   John Renner, the lecturer, started by look at the relationship the city had with the Virgin and the plethora of early images this produced. This followed the Battle of Montaperti with Florence in 1260 when, following the city offering the virgin the keys to the city in the cathedral, it was said that the Virgin laid a veil of mist over the battlefield the next morning leading to Sienna’s victory.  We then went on to look at Duccio’s Maesta painted between 1308-11 and commissioned by the city. He talked us through the iconography in detail and how it can be read in different directions. In the afternoon we moved on the Duccio’s successors Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers who I must admi...

Excellent study day organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House focusing on the role of Pisa in Early Italian Art. This was the second study day in the series and the first to focus on a particular city. In the morning we started by looking at the early painting from Pisa focusing on the Byzantine style of Giunta Pisano. We looked at the various styles of Crucifix and how they changed from the open eyed living Christ to the contorted dead figure and how this followed the theology of the time. We then moved on to the sculpture of Nicola Pisano and talked about how he studies Roman sarcophagi and worked out the techniques involved in them to produce wonderful pulpits. The lecturer has excellent pictures of the pulpits at Pisa and Sienna. In the afternoon we moved on to Giovanni Pisano and looked at how he developed this style having worked with his father on the Sienna pulpit and how he developed the idea of figurative tombs and how this was taken u...

First of a series of study days on Early Italian Art in the 13th and 14th centuries organised by the London Art History Society and held at Friends House. This first day was lead by John Renner and gave an introduction to and overview of the period. It’s a subject I know quite well but it’s good to hear it put into context. The first talk looked at how this art was discovered after it fell out of favour following Vasari’s great work which upheld Michelangelo and Raphael as the pinnacle of art and how early Italian art was rediscovered and championed in the 19th century. We then went on to look at the drivers for artistic creation in this period from the strong economic background, the inception and growth of the new religious orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, and the role of art in showing civic and family importance. This was followed after lunch by a look at the techniques and forms of the art. The lecturer had good slides from the National Gallery which looked at ...