On Tuesday, Year 12 students visited the National Gallery to look at some examples of Italian Renaissance painting, having just begun our study of the period in class. We entered through the recently refurbished Sainsbury Wing and admired from the main staircase Richard Long’s striking ‘Mud Sun’, a newly installed Land artwork created from tidal mud from the River Avon. Once in the galleries, we focused especially on the Florentine paintings of Raphael, stately groupings of pious Madonnas and saints that display the typical Renaissance characteristics of balance, symmetry and geometry. In a room full of paintings from Venice we then contrasted the Florentine focus on draftsmanship with the Venetian focus on colour, also noting the expressive landscape backgrounds in the work of Giovanni Bellini. After a brief pitstop by Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat’, a favourite from our recently completed Identities unit, we went on to track the evolution of Renaissance portraiture. We saw the transition from Baldovinetti’s portrait of an unnamed woman in profile that is more a depiction of her marital alliance and the wealth of her new family than a representation of her character, to Raphael’s introspective Julius II that does show the sitter’s personality – more specifically, the Warrior Pope’s’ regret and melancholy at losing Bologna to the French. How lucky are we to have all these incredible paintings on our doorstep!

Mrs Faircliff, Head of History of Art