- This event has passed.
Earthly Delights: the artists of the Renaissance
23 September @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Ready to take your next journey of Discovery? The Renaissance: Journeys of Discovery at BRLSI is a yearlong programme of talks and events exploring the many joys, discoveries and something of the broader cultural legacy of a movement still making waves in the 21st century. Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Martin Luther, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Hieronymus Bosch, if you love culture then you’ll love our new talks series!
BRLSI are delighted to kick off with a keynote lecture asking, What exactly was the ‘Renaissance’? In the nineteenth century, this flowering of creativity and thought was celebrated as the birth of the modern world. Today many historians are sceptical about its very existence.
Art critic and writer Jonathan Jones’ book Earthly Delights rekindles the Renaissance as a seismic change in European mentalities, in a panoramic history that encompasses Florence and Bruges, London and Nuremberg. Artists from northern as well as southern Europe, including Leonardo, Bosch, Bruegel and Titian, star in a captivating and beautifully illustrated narrative that sets their lives against a period of convulsive change across a continent that was finding itself as it ‘discovered’ the world.
Jonathan tells the story of Renaissance artists as pioneers, adventurers and ‘geniuses’, a Renaissance concept. Albrecht Durer gazes with wonder on Aztec art in Brussels in 1520, Leonardo da Vinci tries to perfect a flying machine, Hieronymus Bosch finds inspiration in West African ivory carvings imported by the Portuguese to Antwerp. A then unknown Netherlandish painter, Pieter Bruegel, arrives in 1550s Rome just as Michelangelo is striving in the same city to raise the new St Peter’s Basilica towards heaven. From Atlantic voyages to Germanic woods, Italian palazzi to the royal castle of Prague, this was an age when people dared to experiment with the occult and dabble in utopias: to think and create new worlds.
Earthly Delights, by Jonathan Jones (Guardian Art Critic) was a Sunday Times Art Book of the Year.
