Italian Renaissance Drawing: Design, Form & Function

1 October – 3 December 2015

Bramante, Bellini, Pontormo, Carracci, Michelangelo, Raphael

This course looked at the powerhouse behind the Italian Renaissance – the drawing. Looking at a variety of drawings across 300 years you will see examples of the practise from Verrocchio, Raphael, and Ghirlandaio. There were also individual classes dedicated to Leonardo and Michelangelo.

The course demonstrated how behind every great Renaissance painting is an equally astounding drawing. Artists were judged firstly not by the quality of their paintings, but by their skill in drawing. We will brought together some of those paintings with their accompanying drawings to demonstrate the importance of drawing upon the Renaissance without which there could be no Renaissance. You will examine how these, at first purely functional objects, were made and how they would eventually be regarded as works of art in their own right. The 8 lectures were complemented by 2 visits to the Prints and Drawings Departments of the Royal Collection, Windsor and the British Museum.