Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

The repercussions of the Florentine artistic revolution of the 14th and 15th centuries were not truly felt in Venice until the 1460s. Although the work of the Venetian painters Jacopo Bellini and Antonio Vivarini soon after 1440 signaled a nascent Venetian school, it was not until Giovanni Bellini’s distinct pictorial style emerged in the 1460s that the Venetian Renaissance truly began. And while Giovanni Bellini had already been experimenting with the oil medium, the arrival of Antonello da Messina to Venice in 1475 marked the beginning of an artistic technical revolution that transformed Venice into Europe’s leading painting school. Combined with Venice’s unique geography, political stability, unparalleled wealth, social mobility, and lack of a classical history, the Venetian school of Renaissance painting quickly came to represent a distinct and revival movement to the central Italian Renaissance of Florence and Rome. This course will trace the evolution of Venetian painting and its protagonists in the second half of the 15th century in order to better understand its importance and role in the history of art.
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Course Objectives:
· To bring a historical figure to life through a “hands on” approach to the works produced during the early Venetian Renaissance.
· To understand the role that the historical context of the Venetian Renaissance had on its extraordinary artistic production.
· To learn to appreciate the rich and influential aspects of early Renaissance Venetian painting at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries.
· To develop the fundamental skills of art historical analysis that include formal analysis and iconographic interpretation.
· To develop an ability to interact in a personal and intimate manner with works of art – which in the case of Venetian painting are some of the most beautiful in history – and their surroundings.