Art Appreciation: Early Quattrocento Italian Art

This course will investigate the emergence of a ‘Renaissance’ style (or styles) of Italian art over the period 1400-1450, considering a range of centres of artistic production, but with a particular emphasis on Florence. We will look in detail at a series of major works of painting and sculpture, in order to track how a new, self-consciously ‘modern’ style of art paradoxically came into being through artists re-inventing versions of an ‘antique’ classicism.

We will focus on a wide range of artists, but especially the contributions of Donatello, Ghiberti, and Masaccio in Florence, and figures such as Sassetta, Pisanello, Uccello, and Jacopo Bellini from other centres in the Italian peninsula. If time permits, we will also being to consider artists such as Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Domenico Veneziano, Castagno, and Filarete, who together in the next generation saw the consolidation of the new manner into a recognisably ‘Renaissance’ style spread across much of the Italian peninsula.

We will look at the art-works with an emphasis on the specific patronage, purpose and location of each, in an attempt to place each work as far as possible back into its original historical, social and art-historical circumstances of making and meaning. Together as a group, we will try to engage with a wide range of interpretations, but always focusing on how this would be constrained by original circumstances of viewing and historical frames of understanding.