Cathy's Art Diary

Fabulous ten week course at the Victoria and Albert Museum on classicism looking both at its roots in the ancient world and how later generations used and developed it. I have been meaning to do a V&A course for ages but, as they are quite long, I don’t get a chance as usually one holiday or another breaks into them. However this Autumn I was grounded after Italy in the summer so I took the opportunity to do this and it was great! While in Rome I’d become fascinated by the ancients remains there and what different artists would have seen at various periods of art history so this was just the course I was looking for. We had some excellent speakers. I’d heard David Bellingham before at the National Gallery and he is a very engaging speaker. I was impressed by the range of dates he could talk about doing talks on Roman emperors and how they showed their power, how Renaissance artists used classical sculpture, a detailed look at Botticelli’s Venus and Mars and then reappe...

First session of a six week course at the Bishopsgate Institute looking at the art of the 19th century, a period of great changes in art and society. The course is led by James Heard and this first session looked at Neo-Classicism.   We began by looking at what is was and how it started with the discover of Pompeii and the influence of Rome and Greece on art. It led to a simplification of vision across the western world and a across genres. In the second half of the session we analysed “The Oath of Horati” by David using it to look at the first part of David’s life and looking at it in the context of the French Revolution. OK this picture was actually 18th century but it sets up the period we are going to study well. Looking forward to next week.