Medieval To Modern: Art And Visual Culture: Art And 'ars' - OpenLearn

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• Subjects
• History & The Arts
• Free courses
• Art and visual culture: medieval to modern
• Art and ‘ars’

Course content

• Introduction
• Learning outcomes
• 1 Medieval to Renaissance
  • 1.1 Art, visual culture and skill
    • Current section: Art and ‘ars’
    • Medieval and Renaissance visual culture
    • Art and adornment
    • Artistic quality
    • Reputation and skill
    • Alberti on painting
    • The Medici as patrons and collectors
  • 1.2 Artists, patrons and workshops
    • Painting, the liberal arts and humanism
    • Artists and patrons
    • Patterns of artistic employment: workshop, guild and court employment
• 2 Academy to avant-garde
  • 2.1 From function to autonomy
    • Bürger’s functions of art: the sacral
    • Bürger’s functions of art: the courtly
    • Bürger’s functions of art: bourgeois art
  • 2.2 From the Baroque to Romanticism
    • Baroque ‘style’
    • Rococo ‘style’
    • Neo-classical ‘style’
  • 2.3 From patronage to the public sphere
    • Patronage
    • From patronage to the open market
    • Habermas and the public sphere
    • The art museum and the painting of current events
• 3 Modernity to globalisation
  • 3.1 Autonomy and modernity
    • Greenberg and autonomy
    • The emergence of modern art in Paris
    • Responses to the modern world
  • 3.2 National, international, cosmopolitan
    • Contradictions
    • A move to New York
    • The local and the global
• Conclusion
• References
• Acknowledgements

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10 hours study

Level 2: Intermediate

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• BA/BSc (Honours) Open degree
• Exploring art and visual culture
• BA (Honours) Arts and Humanities (Classical Studies)

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Course content Course content Art and visual culture: medieval to modern

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Create account / Sign inMore free courses Art and ‘ars’

The Latin word ‘ars’ signified skilled work; it did not mean art as we might understand it today, but a craft activity demanding a high level of technical ability including tapestry weaving, goldsmith’s work or embroidery. Literary statements of what constituted the arts during the medieval period are rare, particularly in northern Europe, but proliferate in the Renaissance. They deliver the odd surprise. In 1504, the Netherlandish writer Jean Lemaire de Belges wrote a poem for his patron Margaret of Austria, sister of the ruler of the Netherlands, in which he listed prominent artists of the day. In addition to painters, he mentions book illuminators, a printmaker, tapestry designers and goldsmiths (Stechow, 1989 [1966], pp. 27–9). Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), the biographer of Italian artists, claimed in his famous book Le vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects; first edition 1550 and revised 1568) that the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) was initially apprenticed to a goldsmith ‘to the end that he might learn design’ (Vasari, 1996 [1568], vol. 1, p. 326). According to Vasari, several other Italian Renaissance artists are supposed to have trained initially as goldsmiths, including the sculptors Ghiberti (1378–1455) and Verrocchio (1435–88), and the painters Botticelli (c.1445–1510) and Ghirlandaio (1448/49–94). The design skills necessary for goldsmiths’ work were evidently a good foundation for future artistic success. All of this calls into question the subsequent academic division between the so-called arts of design and crafts, and not least the relegation of goldsmiths to the realm of craft.

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