Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent two day online course from ARTScapades looking at the history of the Silk Roads and how ideas as well as goods travelled along them. Susan Whilfield from the University of East Anglia guided us through starting with an overview of the history of the routes and the religions which operated along them. She pointed that the routes were a lot wider than usually thought and stretch into Japan at one side and Scandinavia at the other. She then went on to talk about silk itself and how its trade and production travelled along the routes starting in China. She talked about the different qualities of silk that were produced. One the second day she looked at the role of pilgrimages, both Christian and Buddhist, in spreading ideas and bringing goods and souvenirs back. I was fascinated by a Buddhist statue which had been found in Scandinavia with signs that it had been displayed in the same was as they displayed Norse gods. Finally she focused on four objects looking at their t...

Comprehensive and enjoyable  online course from HistFest on Medieval art from the 6th to the 14th century. Over four weeks Janina Ramirez led us though this period via recorded lectures and live Q&A sessions. I think the course had run before with the same lectures but the format worked well and the Q&A sessions were lively and interactive. Ramirez was very approachable and welcomed new ideas.   She encouraged those with questions to turn on their video screens leading to some fascinating conversations. She started with the Dark Ages, which she doesn’t want to be called that, looking at how Christian art started to leak into England both from the Roman and Celtic traditions. She talked about the imagery of intertwined animals and the complex riddles used both in art and literature leading up to the Normal Conquest. Post Conquest we looked at the rise of the artist from anonymous craftsman to a period we see more individualism in society and art. Despite this bein...

Fabulous exhibition at the British Library looking at the Anglo-Saxons. I studied this period at school and university and anything you could want to be there was as well as lots of new discoveries. I moved from object to object remembering things I had long thought I’d forgotten. The show was nicely organised chronologically around the main kingdoms as they came to prominence the around broader themes of language and literature, the church and conquests. It was a nice touch to end with the Domesday Book treating it not as a tool for Norman conquest but as a reflection of the excellent land records which had been kept by the Anglo-Saxons. My old “Were the Norman’s innovators?” essay plan came flooding back! There were so many highlight’s it’s hard to pick a few but here goes! How about Cuthbert’s bible, the earliest European bound book, which looked as fresh as if it had been made yesterday as it had been in Cuthbert’s coffin. Alternatively the Codex Amiatinus, on loan fro...