Free Republic

How much do you know about the Sistine Chapel? Did you know, for example, that it began as a private chapel for Church elites—the “ultimate ecclesiastical man cave”? The Chapel, which attracts 5 million visitors per year, isn’t just an obligatory stop on an art history tour of Italy, it is a living history of the Church and its influences—influences that range from global, geopolitical change to petty personal feuds. This TED talk, by art historian Elizabeth Lev, outlines the evolution of the Chapel in three stages. The full talk, which Lev delivered in Geneva last December, is well...

In this third “class” of this second Art Appreciation series, we’ll examine the various styles of the Renaissance. The Renaissance in Italy is the most varied and the most famous, but there is also a Renaissance in northern Europe, with the works of Bosch, Durer and Brueghel. (If you want to see the other lectures of this series to which I refer here, check on my name below to get to my homepage for clickable links to those very lectures.) Renaissance means “rebirth” of classical Greek and Roman realism, grace, and dignity. If you remember back to lesson two of...