Love and marriage in Renaissance art for City Lit ONLINE
2025-11-18 13:30 - 2025-12-02 15:30 (Europe/London) | ONLINE
A 3 week ONLINE course that focuses on the lavish array of luxury objects and paintings made in Renaissance Italy to commemorate and to celebrate love, marriage, and the family. Marriage was an important way for families to affirm their social status and marriage festivities in the Renaissance were spectacles to rival the celebrity weddings seen today in Hello! Magazine, and both betrothal and marriage were also occasions for extravagant gift-giving.
Dates are Tuesday 18th November, Tuesday 25th November and Tuesday 2nd December.
Full fee £79.00
Senior fee £63.00
Concession £51.00

Making the Renaissance at the V&A: fabrics and fabrications
2026-01-13 11:00 - 2026-01-27 13:00 | Offsite
The Italian Renaissance saw an explosion of artistic creativity based on new ways of using traditional materials. This course will take a different material theme for each of three classes which will all be taught in the Renaissance Galleries of the V &A. Using this unrivalled collection of Italian Renaissance objects, we will look closely at the use of three key materials in this period, clay, wood and silk, in the making of novel art and decorative objects. We will explore how consumer demand for new types of objects sparked this innovation in creative techniques, how craftsmen responded and how manufacturing developed to fulfil the aspiration for new ways of living.
A meeting point for the session will be emailed to you at least one week before the session.

The Beastly Renaissance: Animals in Italian Renaissance Art
2026-02-18 10:45 - 11:45 | Stamford Arts Centre, 27 St. Mary's Street, Stamford, PE9 2DL
Beasts are everywhere in the art of the Renaissance. Lambs, elephants, dogs, camels, cats, weasels, and monkeys, not to mention unicorns, dragons and angels. Real and imaginary creatures populate nativity scenes, accompany saints, sit on the laps of noblewomen, decorate furniture, and sculpture and hide on stairways. Why are they there? What do they mean? And how did artists visualise animals they might never have seen, such as elephants, or imaginary creatures like dragons? This talk offers a fresh perspective on the art of Renaissance Italy through a focus on depictions of creatures of all kinds and their meanings.

The Renaissance at Home
2026-03-06 10:30 - 16:00 | V & A Academy, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL
Step into the Renaissance Home with this study day renaissance course exploring the art and the objects of everyday life in early modern Italy. In lectures and gallery talks, using the unrivalled collection in the V&A Renaissance galleries, this study day offers an introduction to the art and the objects of domestic life in Renaissance Italy.

Wrotham Pottery
2026-04-21 11:00 - 12:00 | Gillingham Masonic Hall, Franklin Rooms, Franklin Road, Gillingham, Kent, ME7 4DF
Wrotham pottery was made between 1612 and 1739 in a small area of Kent close to the village of Wrotham. This distinctive brown slipware, on which the names of the potters are frequently prominently displayed, has been popular with collectors since the end of the 19th century, and a large collection survives in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. This talk explores what we know of the Wrotham potters themselves and looks at the many designs created in these local potteries before competition from large scale production in Staffordshire closed them forever.

A Re‑Imagined Renaissance: The Villas and Collections of the Anglo‑American Community in Florence in the Late 19th Century
2026-05-11 20:00 - 21:00 | The Community Church, Werter Road, Putney, SW15 2LL
English and Americans flocked to Florence at the close of the nineteenth century and many stayed and bought properties.
They shared a passionate interest in Italy, an interest perfectly parodied in E M Forster’s social comedy A Room with a View, written in 1908, a social comedy in which this ex-pat community is minutely examined. The fascination of this community with the Italian Renaissance was expressed through the extensive collections of Renaissance objects with which they decorated their Italian homes.
The lecture we will look inside some of their villas and gardens in Florence and the surrounding countryside to see how these Italophiles reimagined the Renaissance for a new age.

Raphael : Draftsman, Painter, Architect and Designer
2026-06-16 11:30 - 12:30 | Manx Museum Lecture Theatre, Kingswood Grove, Douglas
The painter Raphael was so famous and admired in his lifetime that when he died in 1520 at the age of only 37 it was remarked in Rome that his death had caused sufficient grief in heaven for the walls of the Vatican to tremble and crack. This talk looks at the career the extraordinary fame of Raffaello Sanzio: from his upbringing in Urbino, his earliest works in Umbria, to the height of his fame, working for the great and the good in sixteenth century Rome.
Streamed live to Zoom for members who prefer to watch at home or work.

A Re-imagined Renaissance: The Villas and Collections of the Anglo-American Community in Florence in the late 19th Century
2026-09-24 14:00 - 15:00 | Reigate Park Church, Park Lane East, Reigate, RH2 8BD
English and Americans flocked to Florence at the close of the nineteenth century and many stayed and bought properties there. They shared a passionate interest in Renaissance Italy – a fascination that was expressed through the extensive collections of Renaissance objects with which they decorated their Italian homes. In this lecture we will step inside some of their villas and gardens in Florence and the surrounding countryside to see how these Italophiles reimagined the Renaissance for a new age.
