111-231 Venetian Renaissance Painting: Giorgione, Titian and their Contemporaries

Note

A knowledge of Italian language and history would be helpful, though not essential.

Credit Points

Coordinator

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

This subject aims to introduce students to the art of sixteenth-century Venice, principally the works of the painters Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and Lorenzo Lotto. Special subjects to be studied will include devotional painting, narrative painting in confraternities, portraiture and erotic profane painting. Methods and approaches studied will include connoisseurship, iconography, the study of patronage, the history of conservation, the study of materials and techniques, especially Venetian pigments and the impact of feminist studies on the study of Renaissance painting. The primary Renaissance sources for the subject, both visual and written will be analysed in critical detail, and related to comparative modern critical frameworks. The texts analysed will include Pietro Aretino's "Letters" and the "Lives of the Venetian Artists" written by Carlo Ridolfi and Georgio Vasari. Seminar subjects will include Alfonso D'Este's studiolo at Ferrara, Lorenzo Lotto's portraiture, Titian's Venus of Urbino and the representation of women in Venetian art.

Assessment

Written work which may comprise class paper, essay totalling about 5000 words. An examination may be substituted for part of the assessment.

Prescribed Texts

• J. Anderson, Giorgione, the Painter of 'poetic brevity'. Flammarion. Paris/New York, 1997.
• P. Humfrey, Painting in Renaissance Venice. New Haven and London, 1995.