Venice's Artistic Revolution

About this event

The year 1500-in which many people believed that the world would end-marked the apogee of Venice's economic and cultural greatness. It saw Venice replace Florence as the richest city in the Western world. Yet this same moment bore the seeds of the city's decline. The fact that Venice was uniquely built on water, made it safer and healthier than other European cities. But its peculiarly humid atmosphere and watery light, combined with a monopoly of the finest pigments from the East, also gave rise to a revolution in the methods of European painting. The great protagonists of this revolution were the Bellini family, whose multi-generational studio included three geniuses: first, Giovanni Bellini himself, as he rapidly moves from ancient tempera methods to a new experimentation with oil-and-varnish-based color as seen in the exquisite San Zaccaria Altarpiece or the Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan; then through the groundbreaking masterworks of two geniuses who studied under him: Giorgione's mysterious and atmospheric Tempesta and his enigmatic Portrait of a Man in the San Diego Museum of Art; and finally in the inexhaustible variety of Titian's oeuvre, produced over 70 years of constantly evolving painting, from his early Fête Champêtre to his late works such as The Flagellation of Christ in Munich. Titian's sometimes refined, and at other times highly impressionistic, brushwork was to open the way to the future of European painting and to the almost total predominance of oil technique in the following centuries. By the end of Titian's life, the trade and wealth of the West, as well as the centre of its greatest artistic production, had bypassed Venice, moving to the emerging powerhouses of the North, Antwerp and Amsterdam. In this richly illustrated talk, art historian Nigel McGilchrist examines how Venice's meteoric rise and fall came about, and how a single maritime journey to India at the end of the 15th century broke its hold on Europe's economy. McGilchrist is a former consultant to the Superintendence of Fine Arts of the Italian government and dean of European studies for a consortium of American universities and colleges. General Information View Common FAQs and Policies about our Online Programs on Zoom .