2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K
UK
Established in 1994, The Course offers innovative and exciting lectures in Art History, Literature, Music and Opera.
In this series on German Art, we will go from medieval to modern Germany through artists who would come to be a major influence not just on Northern art but also on the Italian Renaissance and ultimately European art. It will begin in the 1460s and demonstrate the interconnectivity of German artists through their itinerancy, their ingenuity, and rigorous work ethic. Each of the weekly lectures will take a look at an individual artist and in so doing take us from the medieval wood carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider, to the Renaissance art of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein the Younger, to the Baroque art of Adam Elsheimer; from Neo-Classicism to Romanticism and finally to German art of the 19th century with its impact on French Impressionism.
Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610)
This painter is often left out of the historical canon of art history or when included is often difficult to place. Adam Elsheimer was born and trained in Frankfurt and almost exclusively worked on a small scale and painted in oil on copper. We will look at his visits to Munich, Venice and Rome and although his output was small, we will look at the influence of these works on more wellknown artists (Rubens, Rembrandt and Claude) and the influence of Renaissance Venetian artists on him (Tintoretto and Veronese). We will also concentrate on his landscapes, religious works and dynamic compositions as well as the spectacular lighting effects that he learned from the work of those Venetian artists