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NEWSLETTER 14: STUDY HOLIDAYS IN 2010
 
Bergamo and Sicily: postponed.
Investigating Bergamo for the best hotel for a long weekend visit, I found that the jewel in the crown of that city's art collection, the Accademia Carrara, was chiuso per restauro. So our visit to this pleasing double city (città alta and città bassa) will have to be delayed until the art gallery is re-built. Likewise a tour of Sicily was proving just too expensive, and will have to be postponed for a future year.
 
Genoa: 7-13 March.
A week of language study is offered, at several levels, in a small but professional language school: we will travel out on the Sunday to start work at A Door to Italy on the Monday. Classes last all morning, leaving plenty of time to explore the city in the afternoons. Genoa has a huge medieval quarter, a labyrinth of narrow alleys, small squares and churches; it boasts half a dozen seventeenth-century palaces that were the architectural wonders of their day - three of them are now art galleries; and it is also a busy, thriving modern city. If interested, please contact me before 15 January.
 
Giorgione Exhibition in Castelfranco Veneto: 25-27 March.
To celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Giorgione's death, his home town has organised a unique exhibition of painting by him and his contemporaries. Of the 120 works on show, 17 have been attributed to him, including famous paintings gathered from all over the world. Participants could easily build this short trip into a longer stay, in Venice perhaps, or any of the other cities nearby - Vicenza, Mantua or Verona. If you'd like to join this venture, please contact me before 15 January.
 
Florence: 12-18 April.
This study week will focus on the architecture and frescoes of the city where the Renaissance began, and where this thrilling development can be traced in the buildings and their permanent decorations, elements which, unlike easel-painting, can be seen properly nowhere else in the world.

Tutor for this holiday is Patrick Doorly;

the closing date is 15 January.
 
The Ancient History of the Mediterranean: in May.
I am still trying to set up a weekend course dedicated to this fascinating subject, to take place in Cagliari in Sardinia.
 
Padua: 7-10 October.
A full two days to visit this vibrant city, including special visits to Giotto's Arena Chapel. The University, the baptistery, and the huge Basilica of St Anthony, packed with beautiful paintings and statues, as well as a wonderfully interesting historic centre, comprise the other interesting sites in this lively city.

Tutor: Emma Rose Barber
 
Piero della Francesca (Arezzo, Sansepolcro and Urbino): 18-24 October.
We will stay in the charming small town of Città del Castello in Umbria, the ideal centre for a visit to Arezzo, where there is the frescoed choir of the church of San Francesco, usually considered to be Piero's masterpiece, and to Sansepolcro, home of his Resurrection, to Monterchi (the Madonna del Parto), and Urbino, where Federigo di Montefeltro's magnificent palace is now a major art gallery that houses two more paintings by Piero.

Tutor: Alice Foster
 
 
Giorgione
Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, the painter known as Giorgione - Big George - died, most probably of the plague, in 1510 aged about thirty-two. Of the sixty or so works of his thought to have survived, contemporary art historians only attribute five or six paintings to him with absolute certainty. Yet several of his known works seem to have broken new ground in both technique and subject matter, so that he became a serious influence on his fellow Venetian painters. An exhibition mounted in Castelfranco Veneto offers the chance to consider and judge his status as an artist.
 
The Castelfranco Madonna is an altarpiece in the form of a sacra conversazione, with Mary flanked on either side by figures of religious significance (in this case Saints Francis and Nicasius); this kind of picture was pioneered by Giorgione's master Giovanni Bellini, but Giorgione places his figures against a vivid landscape, an idea copied by Bellini in his later paintings. Landscape and sky also feature in Giorgione's small painting called The Tempest, usually in Venice's Accademia. A sitting nude female with a baby is separated by a stream from a clothed and standing young man; the town behind them is framed by darkening storm clouds. Some art historians regard this puzzling work as one of the first landscapes in European art.
 
The Ox and the Ass
In 1223 St Francis went to Rome to seek approval from Honorius III for his new order of friars; he also asked the Pope's permission to create a new and special kind of church service. He had recently returned from the Holy Land where he had been profoundly impressed by his visit to Bethlehem. His plan was to offer a living representation of the nativity so as to bring to life the mystery of the Incarnation. On Christmas Eve 1223, near the rough buildings where he had built his community, against a backdrop of rocks, St Francis staged an open-air nativity scene with a crib, and a real ox and ass. This innovatory act of worship was the origin of the diorama, models and dramatic performances of the Nativity in Christian countries and communities all over the world.
 
But where do the ox and the ass come from? These animals do not feature in either Luke or Matthew's description of the birth of Jesus, yet they are present in artistic representations of the scene from the earliest days of Christianity. Old Testament prophecies are the source. The eighth-century non-canonical gospel called Pseudo-Matthew puts it thus:
 

And on the third day after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary went out of the cave, and, entering a stable, placed the child in a manger, and an ox and an ass adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by the prophet Isaiah, "The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib." Therefore, the animals, the ox and the ass, with him in their midst incessantly adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by Habakkuk the prophet, saying, "Between two animals you are made manifest."

 
In Italian homes and town innumerable presepie - models of the nativity of Jesus, from the simplest to the highly elaborate, constructed in almost every imaginable material - will be on show in the weeks leading up to and after Christmas.
 
 

For further information about any of these study holidays, please contact Martin Gray:

Telephone: 01865 860984
E-mail: martin.gray9@btopenworld.com