HISTORY OF PATRONAGE IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

The course is included among the educational activities of the curriculum in Economics and management of arts and cultural activities and among the activities of the art history curriculum of the degree course in Conservation and management of cultural heritage and activities. The course is dedicated to the analysis of the relationship between patrons and artists, in the Italian and European context. The artistic commissions analysed will concern works of architecture, sculpture and painting. The course will provide students with the appropriate tools to consider artistic and architectural expressions in relation to the context in which they arose. Artistic 'genius' will then be confronted with the dynamics of patronage and the needs of patrons to highlight the dialectical relationship between society and artistic creation.
This year the course programme will focus on Baroque Venice (17th and 18th centuries).
At the end of the course, students will be able to analyse a work of art not only in terms of its formal and stylistic qualities, but will also have acquired the ability to read the artist and his work from a socio-cultural angle.

- Knowledge and understanding: to know the examples dealt with in class and to understand their meaning in a historical and contemporary perspective.
- Ability to apply the acquired knowledge: to use an appropriate vocabulary to express contents and meanings.
- Communication skills: to know how to formulate in written and oral form the acquired knowledge.
- Learning ability: at the end of the course the student should be able to recognise and place historically the examples treated during the lessons. To this end, the student must know how to integrate the notes of the lessons with the reading of the indicated texts.

Basic knowledge of the history of art and architecture is desirable as it will facilitate understanding of many topics.

The course programme includes an analysis of the relationship between patrons and artists in Venice in the modern age. The main focus will be on the 17th and 18th centuries, but it will be necessary to place the phenomena of the Baroque period in a broader temporal range. In particular, architectural episodes and their patrons will be analysed.

Details of the bibliography will be provided at the beginning of the course and during the lectures.
1) The texts that specifically refer to the topics covered in the lessons are available on the Moodle page dedicated to the course.
2) The slides of the lectures contain links to additional texts that can be consulted and/or downloaded.
3) A number of reference texts will also be available on the Moodle page.

For the purposes of the exam, students must have read the texts associated with the individual lessons/topics (see point 1 here).

Here some basic texts:
• M. Favilla - R. Rugolo, Venezia barocca. Splendori e illusioni di un mondo in 'decadenza', Schio, Sassi editore, 2009.
• F. Haskell, Patrons and painters. A study in the relations between italian art and society in the age of the Baroque, London, Chatto and Windus Ltd, 1963 [trad. it. Mecenati e pittori. Studio sui rapporti tra arte e società italiana nell'età barocca, Firenze, Sansoni, 1966 e successive ristampe]
• Painting for profit. The economic lives of seventeenth-century Italian painters, a cura di R.E. Spear e P. Sohm, New Haven-London, Yale Univ. Press, 2010: cap. 5, Venice, pp. 206-244.
• R. Wittkower, Art and architecture in Italy 1600-1750, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, 1958 [trad. it. Arte e architettura in Italia 1600-1750, Torino 1972 e successive ristampe]; chapters dedicated to Venice.

written exam
Students will be asked to answer three types of questions
1) 3-4 questions on topics covered in lectures that require very precise and very short answers
2) from a shortlist of questions on topics covered during the course, students are asked to choose one and develop their answer in discursive form (about 2 pages).

lectures with slides. The ppts will be available on Moodle.

Italian

Students who are unable to attend class will follow the same syllabus as those who do. The lecturer is available (possibly during a reception) to provide further details on the programme and the bibliography.

written