Our events are recorded and on-demand to ticket holders for a month. Proceeds from ticket sales benefit UK museums, galleries and other arts-based organisations.
Andrea Mantegna, The Camera degli Sposi, 1465-74. Mantua,Italy.
Join Hilary Hope Guise for ‘Space’, the second of an exciting series of three beautifully illustrated talks exploring the depiction of light, space and time in art. These core features of our physical world have been the same for millennia – and yet, down the ages, artists have found different ways to interpret them.
Space:
In early Celtic and Anglo-Saxon times, space was frightening, harbouring invisible demonic spiritual forces that caused a great fear of emptiness. This manifested throughout the Middle Ages as a fear of Space itself. This ‘Horror Vacui’ in which no space is allowed is evident in centuries of art.
In the 17th century, space, as a good and natural thing, is re-born in the airy landscapes of Claude Lorrain in step with the advance of intellectual freedom in the Enlightenment. We return to the horror vacui in the late 19th century in Rodin’s Gates of Hell which prophetically announce a century of war. Finally, the humbling reality and vastness of Space shows us ourselves for the first time, as seen by NASA cameras from the other side of the moon.
This is an online event hosted on Zoom which can be watched live with Q&A, or on-demand for one month afterwards. You will receive your link to access the event in your email confirmation and the on-demand link after the event ends.