Details

ONLINE ART HISTORY COURSE
“The Renaissance of Painting in Venice (Part I)”

Course Description:

The repercussions of the Florentine artistic revolution of the 14th and 15th centuries were not truly felt in Venice until the 1460s. Although the work of the Venetian painters Jacopo Bellini and Antonio Vivarini soon after 1440 signaled a nascent Venetian school, it was not until Giovanni Bellini’s distinct pictorial style emerged in the 1460s that the Venetian Renaissance truly began. And while Giovanni Bellini had already been experimenting with the oil medium, the arrival of Antonello da Messina to Venice in 1475 marked the beginning of an artistic technical revolution that transformed Venice into Europe’s leading painting school. Combined with Venice’s unique geography, political stability, unparalleled wealth, social mobility, and lack of a classical history, the Venetian school of Renaissance painting quickly came to represent a distinct and revival movement to the central Italian Renaissance of Florence and Rome. This course will trace the evolution of Venetian painting and its protagonists in the second half of the 15th century in order to better understand its importance and role in the history of art.

Course Objectives:

Virtual Classroom: Full access to an online educational platform with discussion forum, videos of recordings, syllabus, and readings.

Credits: Certificate of Completion

Location: LIVE INTERACTIVE ON-LINE ART HISTORY LECTURES

Optional Readings:
Readings to be provided to students in PDF format prior to the beginning of course.

Complete syllabus will be provided upon registration.

• ALL LECTURES WILL BE RECORDED AND AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING AT YOUR CONVENIENCE IN OUR VIDEO LIBRARY FOR THE DURATION OF THE COURSE

Schedule

– LECTURE 1 – Monday, April 17: The Dawn of the Venetian Renaissance: Jacopo Bellini and Antonio Vivarini

The first two Venetian artists to actively respond to the artistic trends coming out of Florence in the 15th century were Jacopo Bellini and Antonio Vivarini, who founded the two dynasties that were to dominate the early Renaissance in Venice. Jacopo, the older and more inventive of the two, was trained by the International Gothic master, Gentile da Fabriano; while Vivarini’s more conservative artistic output was limited to altarpieces in richly gilded and elaborately carved frames.

– LECTURE 2 – Monday, April 24:The Advent of Oil Painting: Giovanni Bellini and Antonello da Messina

The first important phase of Venetian painting in the early Renaissance was certainly defined by the work of Giovanni Bellini, whose earlier works demonstrate the influence of his talented brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna, with their incisive, linear forms. But the arrival of Antonello da Messina to Venice in 1475 allowed Giovanni to perfect his mastery of the oil medium and to dramatically shift the direction that Venetian painting would take.

– LECTURE 3 – Monday, May 1:Narrative Painting in Venetian Confraternities: Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio

The emergence of large-scale cyclical narrative paintings in late 15^th-century Venice was a conscious response to contemporary fresco cycles by central Italian painters such as Ghirlandaio, Lippi, and Perugino. Yet, while central Italian frescoes usually decorated churches or chapels in central Italy, in Italy, narrative paintings decorated the walls of lay confraternities known as “scuole.” The two most-sought-after pictorial storytellers of early Renaissance Venice were Gentile Bellini (once thought to be the brother of Giovanni) and Vittore Carpaccio.