Giant Steps: Art And Music In Europe 1520 1840

The political and religious upheaval of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation brought with it a surge of creativity that ultimately powered the Baroque period. The seventeenth century was characterised by sweeping gesture and uninhibited expressiveness, the eighteenth by balance and exactitude. But the fantasies of the Romantic era were just around the corner.

We will be investigating the work of Caravaggio, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and many others.

The end of the Renaissance period is difficult to define with precision. Many date it to the Sack of Rome by Charles V’s troops in 1527 when artists of all kinds fled the city. Certainly there were profound changes in music from that date onwards, many of which were inspired by the architect of the Reformation, Martin Luther, himself a talented composer and musician.

Following the Council of Trent (1545-63), the established Church responded to Protestantism with a sweeping reaffirmation of Catholic practices including music. At the same time the epicentre of art shifted, albeit temporarily, to Venice where Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese took painting in new directions.

The Baroque period began in Rome around 1600.  Caravaggio’s dramatic, often shocking, pictures set the course of art for many years, influencing Rubens, among others. It was, too, the time  of the Golden Age - in Spain, the Spanish Netherlands  and the newly formed Dutch Republic. That brought with it some of the greatest art ever seen in Europe. But while the paintings of Frans Hals were uncompromisingly positive, Velázquez – and, especially, Rembrandt and Vermeer – were more equivocal.

The energy, emotion and unpredictability of Baroque art had its counterpart in the new form of music: opera. Instrumental music was also reaching new heights of sophistication and the two came together at the court of Louis

XIV with work of the King’s composer, Lully.  Meanwhile Johann Sebastian Bach took counterpoint to a new level but his technical wizardry was accompanied by irresistible expressive power.

Rococo took Baroque elaboration to extremes but in the process lifted the spirits of a continent torn apart by war. Watteau, Boucher, Vigée-Le Brun, and particularly Fragonard made art fun again. Yet the Age of Reason brought with it a predisposition for clarity, precision and form which - together with the renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman culture – resulted in Neoclassicism. Similarly the music of the mid-eighteenth century mutated from complex Baroque structures to the elegance and symmetry of the Classical period, embodied by the two giants of the genre, Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven provided the bridge to the Romantic period; with the advent of Mendelssohn, the transition was complete.

I do hope you will be able to join me on this exciting  journey through two hundred years of beautiful European art and music – measurable in progressive giant steps toward the modern world.

Schedule:

1. The Changing Face Of Sixteenth Century Music

2. Venetian Visionaries

3. The New Art:  Caravaggio and the early Baroque

4. Baroque-Bach Mountain: Music In The Seventeenth Century

5. Golden Age Painters 1: Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez

6. Golden Age Painters 2: Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer

7. Prog Baroque: Jean-Baptiste Lully and Johann Sebastian Bach

8. The Rococo Touch: Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré

Fragonard and Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun

9. Classic Definition: Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

10  Back To The Future: Neoclassicism In Art

11 The Revolutionary: Ludwig van Beethoven

12 The First Romantic: Felix Mendelssohn