Monday 25th November 2024

The Fields and Forests in Venice
Chantal Brotherton Ratcliffe
 

Everyone who has been to Venice will look at this title, and think “fields and forests in Venice? Are there any?” And of course, the answer is no, there are none. And anyone who has stayed in Venice for a long time will have experienced a sudden overwhelming longing for something that’s green, a bit of nature, for anything that’s not a brick wall or a canal. 

Many of the artists we think of as Venetian, such as Titian, Giorgione or Cima, were born and grew up in small villages or towns on the mainland, and their paintings are full of a nostalgia for the countryside. In their work, landscapes of incomparable beauty appear, first in the backgrounds of many paintings, and later, as a subject matter in its own right.

These beautiful depictions of distant mountains and rural valleys were made possible by the development of the oil paint technique in Venice, when artists could exploit the flexibility of oil to paint the light of golden afternoons and sunsets. This lecture explores those landscapes, and will show why landscape painting flourished in Venice.

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Chantal Brotherton Ratcliffe

Chantal Brotherton-Ratcliffe has become a regular guest to London Art and More. She has an MA in History of Art from Edinburgh, and a PhD from the Warburg Institute, London University. With 40 years' experience as a lecturer, Chantal has taught at Sotheby's Institute of Art and regularly lectures for the National Gallery  and The Wallace Collection. She also trained as a paintings conservator and brings an understanding of the making and the physical painting to her lectures.

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