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This series has argued that the origins of modern secularism lie in the age of the Renaissance. This last lecture will track that legacy down to the present.
The newly discovered Salvator by Leonardo, the world’s most costly picture, is one of his most notable creations, in which he used his ‘science of art’ to transform a stock subject into a profound expression of the ineffability of the divine. We will look at the remarkable story of its discove
The changing balance of power and wealth between the aristocracy and the monarchy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century has fundamentally influenced today’s national cultural landscape of art and architecture.
An integral part of the tumultuous political events of the century was the cultural ambition of the principal players who form the subject of this lecture.
Jonathan Bate will follow in the footsteps of the 18th-century inventors of the ‘picturesque’ and show how Wordsworth shaped the vision of his native region, leading to the foundation of the National Trust and the idea of a National Park.
In the third of his lectures on the rhetoric of Romanticism, Jonathan Bate will explore how they did so, with particular emphasis on the role of children in the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth.
Leading actor and Shakespeare scholar Michael Pennington discusses the direct effect on the dramatist's writing of the theatres he wrote for, so different from ours.
The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 gave Chinese artists a government that had explicit policies for the arts, seeing them as an essential part of the creation of ‘new China’.