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, In the Camera Degli Sposi.
We are surrounded by the air we breathe, the spaces we move in, and the light and colour travelling in constantly fluctuating waves through the spaces we inhabit. These core features of our physical world have been the same for millennia – and yet art down the ages has always interpreted them differently. These changes have gone unnoticed at the time, yet are obvious to us looking back.
This is the thought provoking theme of ARTscapades’ series of three talks by Hilary Hope Guise. Each lecture takes our exploration further, but they can be booked and enjoyed separately too.
Lecture Two: Space
In the Dark Ages, from early Celtic and Anglo-Saxon times, space was frightening. It harboured invisible demonic spiritual forces that caused a great fear of emptiness. This manifested throughout the Middle Ages as a fear of Space itself. The philosophical debate about space, and the impossibility of a vacuum, dates back to Aristotle, and dominated philosophy for centuries.
The horror of emptiness, the ‘Horror Vacui’, is evident in centuries of art in which no space is allowed. But space, as a reality, and as a good and natural thing, is re-born in the airy landscapes of Claude Lorrain in the 17th century 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 of Space itself, and its impenetrable vastness, 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.