This tour will emphasise the importance of Renaissance art patronage with its diverse personal, dynastic, religious, political and cultural agendas. The strong spirit of competition amongst both corporate and individual patrons helped foster some renowned patron-artist relationships and highly innovative artistic approaches. Corporate patronage included the Papal bureaucracy, the works…
In the Middle Ages, architects were regarded as practical master masons, stone workers or wood workers. During the Renaissance they were given the Greek designation “architect”, they were no longer anonymous, a few were even educated in geometry and Latin, they made very detailed plans and models for their patrons,…
The notion of a solitary artist hidden away in his or her studio, expressing an idea in visual form for exhibition or for someone to perhaps purchase on spec, was uncommon in the Renaissance. This might have been true of small devotional images and domestic items, but larger scale works…
Renaissance artists and intellectuals keenly debated the relative worthiness of painting and sculpture. This hot topic of the day was called the paragone (Italian, comparison) and was paralleled by a discussion of the relative merits of painting and poetry. Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise On Painting (1435) asserted the pre-eminence of…
