Teaching by doing: making Renaissance clothes. For soft toys.

One of the modules I am teaching for finalists is quite a challenge from the point of view of delivering it. ‘Renaissance luxuries’ takes, in a way, it’s inspiration both from Richard Goldthwaite’s work on Wealth and the Demand for Art in Renaissance Italy, and AD Fraser Jenkins’ musings on magnificence. In the course of…

Authenticity, originality, attribution: does the author matter?

If recent text coverage is to be accepted, the Renaissance canon has expanded. Again. Quite dramatically, actually. Take, for example, the new ‘Leonardo‘. Or the new ‘Titian’ These discoveries have generated considerable discussion, but, I note, not discussion on the images themselves, but rather on how the addition of these images to the established canon…

Teaching the Renaissance: challenges and opportunities

I am a Renaissance art historian with a particular research interest in the Venetian mainland empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and general research interests concerned with elites, luxury, gender, material culture and a fondness for prodigy houses! especially their roofs. I am a university lecturer who teaches on pretty much anything from Renaissance…

Francois the Frog

Francois on my suitcase looking ready to go on holiday. He was a borrowed frog.Actually,he is the class pet.When I got him,he had a leak,so Frog fixed it with metallic gold thread.He is now a very happy frog!