Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating two week online course from ARTscapades looking at the development of the Gothic style in France. Jana Gajdošov from Sam Fogg Limited and the Victoria and Albert Museum lead us clearly through four lectures, the first three grouping cathedrals chronologically and stylistically and the last focusing on Notre Dame often seen as the pinnacle of the style. It would have been useful to have a glossary of terms to refer to so I had to do a lot of Googling for spellings when I typed up the notes but as the course progressed you became more familiar with the terms. I liked the way the speaker took us through church by church building up a progression of ideas. I discovered a number of cathedrals I hadn’t heard of before and now have yet another travel itinerary to add to the bucket list.

Basic online discussion from London Art Week looking at monasteries and the art they produced. Jana Gajdosova of Sam Fogg and Michael Carter of English Heritage discussed the rise and fall of monasteries and convents. They are working on an exhibition at Sam Fogg of objects from monasteries and the talk was illustrated with objects which will be in the show. It was a slightly simplistic talk but a good introduction to the subject for those who didn’t know much about it. However it did also have nuggets of things I didn’t know like an outline of the different types of tonsures and an interesting outline of how the austere Cistercian style evolved over the years.

Fascinating online tour from London Art Week of an exhibition at Sam Fogg looking at Medieval women as the subject and makers of art. Jana Gajdosova, Medieval specialist at Sam Fogg and Alexandra Gajewski   of Burlington Magazine took us round the show with four brief videos of the installation then picked out specific images to highlight themes. I loved the image of St Avia shown here which would probably have been set in a wall and fascinated to hear about Shrine Madonna’s which open up down the chest to reveal an image, often a Trinity, and fell out of fashion due to the theological contradiction that them implied the Virgin came before all aspects of the Trinity not just the son. They kept mentioning a previous round table discussion which I found on the Sam Fogg website which involved the two speakers from the talk plus Jeffrey Hamburger from Harvard University and Madeline Caviness from Tuft University. This talked more about the themes involved including the idea of who...