Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent online study morning from Paula and Geoff Nuttall looking at the history and art of Naples from the 13th to 15th century. Geoff started the morning by looking at the Angevin’s who ruled the city from 1266 to 1435 guiding us through the complicated order of succession covering both the early French Angevins and the later Durazzo branch of the family from Hungary and Croatia. He outlined their building work in the city and looked in particular at the patronage of the civil servants around King Ladislav. I was delighted that he spent quite a lot of time talking about the tomb shown here for Admiral Antonio Baboccio de Piperno which I had discovered a few years ago and loved but I didn’t know a lot about it. He talked us through the imagery in some detail. Paula then took over looking at the Aragonese rulers of the city from 1442 to about 1504 focusing on Alfonso I including his work to rebuild the Castel Nuovo, his commissioned of medals from Pisanello, his interest in Nor...

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.

Fascinating exhibition at the British Library looking at the history of Gothic fiction. It started with the Castle of Otranto and looked at the life and work of its author Horace Walpole. I loved seeing a reliquary of Thomas Beckett he owned shown with a letter by Henry Cole describing it. It then looked at the growth in the genre and showed an early copy of Northanger Abbey with the seven ‘horrid novels’ mentioned in the book. It then looked at the Romantic period including the events leading up to the publication of Frankenstein and The Vampyre. Next came the Victorian era with works by Wilkie Collins but it also included Dickens on the premise that Gothic fiction moved into the ‘modern world’ of slums and poverty rather than an imagined past. Cinema was well covered both from the point of view of films of these early books but also as a medium in its own right for telling gothic tales. All the classics were covering including works like The Birds. Modern gothic was...