Centro Machiavelli in Florence offers a great variety of art history courses as a complement to the Italian courses. The journey through the history of art is designed as a lecture, enlivened by slide shows, literature and theme related city tours and discovery visits with art works on site. For students who meet for the first time studying art history, a 2-hour orientation session is provided. The lessons are taught by dedicated, well trained instructors with an official city guide of Florentine approval.
From the Middle ages to the early Renaissance
8 hours of one to one classroom lessons and guided visits:
- Historical introduction to the middle ages.
- Medieval man.
- Great changes which occur in society: the passage from rural life to urbanization. The great need for spirituality, the conception of the world and the hereafter during this time.
- The construction of the cathedrals.
- The mendicant orders.
- Public buildings.
- Mercantile relations with the Arab world.
- Historic, social, economic, and philosophical changes that lead to the birth of the new man.
- Giotto, Cosimo il Vecchio, Brunellesci, Donatello, Masaccio and the workshop of Ghiberti.
From early Renaissance to late Renaissance
6 hours of one to one classroom lessons and 4 guided visits.
- The different artistic languages that characterize the Florentine scene.
- The artists who follow the most radical and innovative movement … that of Masaccio, Brunelleschi and Donatello.
- The members of a traditional movement of the late 1400’s and the movement of the moderate artists, or those who approached innovation cautiously.
- The other pole of the artistic renewal … The Flemish and their renaissance.
- The other centers of the Italian Renaissance amongst which Urbino and Piero della Francesca.
- The artistic scene in Florence at the end of the 1500’s.
- The great workshops: those of Verrocchio, of the Pollaiolos and of the della Robbias.
- The art of Botticelli, an interpreter of the culture and refined renaissance. An expression of a society that was by then in decline — and that saw in Lorenzo il Magnifico its political and intellectual representative.
The Cinquecento
6 hours of one to one classroom lessons and 4 guided visits.
- Painting in Venice: the affirmation of ‘tonal’ painting.
- Giorgione and Titian and the alternative choices of Sebastiano del Piombo, the artist who united the innovations of of Giorgione and Titian’s painting with the the reflection on ancient art.
- Painting in Venice during the second half of the Cinquecento: Bassano, Tintoretto, Veronese.
- Leonardo da Vinci: from Florentine beginnings to the Milan season.
- Leonardo, man of science who expresses the most ancient values of humanism.
- Michelangelo, from Florentine beginnings to the great season in Rome.
- Michelangelo: painter, sculptor, architect and poet.
- The great works of Michelangelo for the Medici.
- Raffaello, from the beginnings in the workshop of Perugino to the stay in Florence and to the great season in Rome.
Mannerist Art
4 hours of one to one classroom lessons and 6 guided visits.
- The great inheritance of Raffaello, Michelangelo and Leonardo.
- The diffusion of a classical movement and of a mannerist one.
- The great characters … of Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Daniele da Volerra, Andrea del Sarto.
- Refined and cultured art at the court of Cosimo de Medici and in the other European courts.
- Palazzo Vecchio and Piazza Signoria: Gianbologna, Cellini and Ammanati.
- Boboli Gardens: extraordinary example of the Italian garden, result of a refined and intellectual society as was that of the second half of the Cinquecento.
The Seicento
6 hours of one to one classroom lessons and 4 guided visits.
- Rome at the beginning of the Seicento: capital of the catholic restoration.
- The protagonists of the renovation of painting in Rome: Caravaggio, from the Lombard beginnings to the season in Rome, Caracci, from the Academy in Bologna to Rome.
- Genre Painting. the naturalist movement and the classical movement.
- Caravaggio and his influence.
- The great Baroque art of Rome and the painting of the 17th century in the rest of Europe: Bernini, Borromini, Pietro da Cortona, Rubens …
- Florentine painting of the 17th century.
For further information visit: http://www.centromachiavelli.org/