Today we examined Jan van Eyck, Dura and Rembrant. Dura was my favourite, he had an amazing diversity of skills with woodcuts, paint, oil paint, drawings and everything elso imaginable. His images had the most intricate detail and amazing symbolism. Jan van Eyck was the first artist ever to use oil paint and i was quite inpressed with that achievment and his paintings, its not every day you just go inventing a whole new medium. Rembrant wasnt very ineresting to m...

Today we swept upon venice in a thoroughly excited mood for we were examining the renaissance! The renassance spannned from 1400-1600 and started in venice (the cause for our excitment). In the 13th century we heard that Italy was very poor and so wasnt affected by the Gothic movement, this left it open to start the re-birth (Renaissance). It was Giotto who kicked off the process 2 centuires before and now it was taking affect. Artists started to really look at h...

Today we were in florence looking at the art of Giotto. Our tour guid told us he was a revolutionary artist for his time, re-descovering things the Greeks discovered. He started life as a shepard boy with his dad a simple farmer. One day Cimabue, a great artist of the time, was passing by Giottos dads farm when he found Giotto drawing some sheep on a rock with some charcoal. He was amazed at how real the sheep looked and took on Giotto as his apprentice. He learn...

Today we took a look at Byzantine art, it was fascinating! I learnt that the Byzantine era went for 14 thousand years and that the thing that they were most famous for was their amazing glass mosaics. We saw some amazing architecture and learnt that they invented the squinch which is a kinda triangular bit of a dome shaped thing which holds up the dome on top of the their orthodox churches. They also did amazing iluminated manuscripts, paintings and carvings. Wha...

Day 3:Rome Today we looked in greater depth at the early christian art. i found it to be very symbolic and there were not very many pictures as such. we also went down inrto the catacombs which i found quite scary. we finished up with dinner looking out over the city from the mountain. what a day but soon we head on somewhere else i believe .