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Course 5 – Summer School on Campus

Monday 22 – Friday 26 June 2026

Dr Michael Douglas Scott

£695

Course Description:

The early 1500s in Italy are viewed as a period of seismic change in the visual arts. In Florence, Milan and Rome, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael forged a style that has come to be labelled ‘High Renaissance’. According to Giorgio Vasari’s famous Lives of the Artists (1550/1568), the achievements of these contemporaries surpassed even those of the artists of classical antiquity. The unearthing of the statue of the ‘Laocoon’ in 1506 came to symbolise this birth of a new Golden Age. Thus Michelangelo’s nudes emulated the heroic grandeur of their antique sculptural models just as Bramante’s new St.Peter’s was to match the Pantheon and the magnificence of imperial Rome. Raphael, above all others, was to standardise this reformulation of classical excellence and create a canon handed down through the academies of Europe for centuries.

This classical norm was already challenged within the lifetime of Michelangelo by ‘mannerism’ and the inventive Venetian way of handling colour. In the Modern Age, the very concept of a single ideal style has been contested and the central dominance of Western civilisation contextualised. This course will explore how the notion of a normative ‘High Renaissance’ style was conceived, institutionalised, challenged and ultimately subverted, to the point that its very existence is now questioned by some. What was ‘High’ about this phase of art history and what values underlie its formation and establishment?

Classroom sessions on ‘High Renaissance’ art and its legacy will be complemented by visits to the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Royal Academy.