Italian Renaissance Drawing: Design, Form and Function

This course will look 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 will also be individual classes dedicated to Leonardo and Michelangelo. The course will demonstrate 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 bring 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 will be complemented by 2 visits to the Prints and Drawings Departments of the Royal Collection, Windsor and the British Museum.

The Function of Drawings

In this lecture we will see how drawings were used in a variety of ways to create paintings and sculpture but how they achieved this varied. You will look at the clues that show us how the various techniques facilitated the transfer of ideas in drawings to finished works, including the patron’s influence and how this affected the drawing and works derived from it.

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