The Culture Concept Circle’s comprehensive course of study the Evolution of Art, Design & Style contains sumptuous imagery and beautiful music.
The course traces humankind’s journey from antiquity to the modern age by surveying the evolution of painting, sculpture, architecture, interiors, gardens, music and much much more.
It includes the intimate world of the fashionable from classical antiquity to the courts of Europe and on to the founding cities of America and Australia today.
All eras and epochs are examined with respect to intellectual, philosophical and spiritual ideas, other cultural influences and social change. The four segments of the complete course are entitled
1 Civilised | 2 Classic | 3 Cultured | 4 Creative
• Each segment contains 10 sessions in two parts 20 – 30 minutes duration
Each segment is available for purchase in podcast, ebook and video format for as little as $1.99.
- Videos = accompanied by beautiful music and imagery. Can be watched on your Computer, iPhone or iPad. Nearly an hour of video for less than $5 five dollars
- Podcast = two episodes each approximately 20 – 30 mins long (see Product FAQ)
- eBooks = can be read on your computer, on your Kindle, iPad or other eBook reader. Sumptuous colour images illustrate each session
Civilised – Days 1 – 10 are now available click here
Classic – Days 11 – 20 are now available click here
1 CIVILISED – At the Beginnings of Art
Day 1 – Cradle of Civilization
The survey begins with an overview of the emergence of ancient societies and their progress discussing the development of architecture, gardens and costume. We highlight the ancient Egyptians who were pioneers in the art of adornment, especially the creation of jewellery.
Day 2 – An Arcadian Ideal
Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322) said ‘the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance’. He noted temples, sculpture, and paintings reflected the individual tastes of their creators and patrons, an idea that opened the way for their being considered ‘works of art’ rather than just religious ritual or political images.
Day 3 – Precincts of Power and Glory
The advancement of classical disciplines under Roman rule, highlighting the reign of first century Emperor Augustus. We discuss the treatise of architect Marcus Pollio Vitruvius and what it reveals about Roman design and construction. Caught in a time warp, Herculaneum and Pompeii have today revealed a great deal of fact about living and lifestyle in Ancient Rome.
Day 4 – Conversion, Cornerstones and Civilized Life
We discuss what defines a sacred space in any culture, creed or religion and examine a wealth of imposing buildings, including the development of the Gothic style in architecture in France and England starting with the Abbot Suger in St Denis at Paris. We discuss how the civilizing energies of the Anglo Saxons in England received an enormous boost by the arrival of Christianity and how the victory by the Normans at Hastings would change the face of civilized life.
Day 5 – At the Meeting of Heaven and Earth
Constantinople was sited on the Bosporus its waters dividing Asia from Europe. There the heritage of the classical world was preserved and developed in the Byzantine Style. When transposed to Russia and Venice it was intertwined with European Gothic architecture to create a unique style.
Day 6 – Mosaics at Ravenna – One Part Only
Originating in Ancient Greece to ornament floors of domestic buildings, mosaics became a technical tour-de-force when practiced by Roman artisans. At the Church of San Vitale in the City of Ravenna the finest examples from the Byzantine Empire are conserved. They reflect its beliefs and concerns prior to its decline.
Day 7 – Paradise Found
The creativity of the people of Islam had no peer in the European mediaeval world. The idea of paradise translated into an earthly garden, which anticipated the heaven to come. The Moorish gardens of Spain would have considerable influence on the development of western art forms and cloister gardens when encountered by Crusaders. Back in Europe the conception of the ‘inner and ‘outer’ spaces of medieval gardens often combine in one tale so that imaginary adventures can take place both in the enclosed secret garden as well as outside in woods and meadows where nature is in awesome control.
Day 8 – Threads of Destiny
Woven textiles are a transmitter of both wealth and status and a measure for the development of a society from its primitive or early beginnings in ancient societies. By the second half of the fourteenth century tapestry and needlework had both become a highly important aspect of England and Europe’s societies and economies. We discuss the so-called Bayeaux tapestry, important medieval woven textiles, including the six Lady and Unicorn tapestries. We look at the traditions associated with embroidery, highlighting Opus Anglicanum, or English work.
Day 9 – Choirs, Châteaux & Courtly Love
The European medieval mind concerned itself with the soul, harmony and music as major aspects of the kósmos, the order of all things and nature. Music, while being associated with entertainment and frivolity, became a form of communication vital to inner well-being. Medieval engineers in France produced a wealth of imposing buildings as glittering symbols of power Splendid new chateaux provided settings for celebration and troubadours spread ideas associated with courtly love, marriage, virtue and femininity.
Day 10 – Precious Cargoes from Cathay
In the Far East we find the cultural catalyst of China. The development of Chinese ceramics began eight thousand years ago with the crafting of hand-moulded earthenware vessels. China dominated its neighbours, its influences eddying strongly to Europe, originally through the Near and Middle East. We survey Chinese ceramics from the Neolithic period to the Ming Dynasty and discuss a growing western passion for blue and white porcelain and the diversity and skill associated with producing such wares.
Days 1 – 10 – BUY NOW
2 CLASSIC
Artists & Artisans
Days 11 & 12 – Italian Renaissance
The rediscovery of ancient texts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe changed perceptions and a new group of accomplished architects and artisans who collectively ushered in a new era in art, design and style. Central to that development was the emergence of the artisan as a creator, an artist who was sought after, supported and respected for his erudition and imagination. The Villa represented, in architectural form, the cultural ideal of rural life and its frescoed interiors and gardens provided the setting for undisturbed intellectual and creative activities, leisurely conversation with friends and the delights of contemplating the natural and cultivated landscape in different seasons and conditions.
Days 13 & 14 – The French Renaissance – Three Parts
François 1 dazzled Europe with the sophistication of his court and Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci [1452-1519], former festaivolo at the court of Milan became his ‘Master of the Entertainments’. Following his son Henry II’s untimely death devastating religious wars ensued until Henry IV [1553-1610], the Great, restored France to peace, strong monarchy and stable government. He set about reviving an interest in learning, the arts, as well as rending great public works including the stylish Place Royale (des Voges) in the fashionable Marais district. We will discuss some of the superb chateaux of the Loire and the contribution of two women of influence Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medici.
Day 15 The Tudors – In the Name of Progress
Henry VII defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485, and during his reign ideas that were part of the intellectual life of the Renaissance in Italy would be introduced by Count Baldassare Castiglione a special ambassador to the court from the court at Mantua. His son Henry VIII wanted to outshine the princes of Europe and had the means and innate taste to do so and he set about it with great gusto.
Day 16 The Tudors – In the Name of Progress Part 3
Henry VIII’s son Edward succeeded him as a minor but died before his majortity and the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey lost her head to Bloody Mary, who lasted only five years. When his daughter Elizabeth 1 came to the throne with a new vision for hope in place with a monarch, who had herself suffered and survived a great deal to succeed, a building boom began. This is an age that admired the grotesque among the beautiful.
Day 16 The Stuarts – Divine Right of Kings – Part 1
Under the rule of Mary Queen of Scot’s son James 1 (1566 – 1625) uniting the kingdoms of England, Scotland, Wales and northern Ireland would be a major development, both politically and economically. We examine the works of architect Inigo Jones whose career was interrupted by the demise of Charles 1 [1600 - 1649] who lost his head with the arrival of Cromwell, the Commonwealth and the newly found preference for functionalism.
Day 17 – Dutch Simplicity, Sobriety and Sensuality
The northern and southern Netherlands [today's Holland and Belgium] was united under Spanish rule until 1579 when a sense of national pride influenced the nature of art including still life. Collectively the works of such as Rembrandt, Rubens and their contemporaries reflect a seventeenth century community of solid, commonplace people supporting a society in which corporate effort for the public good was rewarded by a booming economy.
Day 18 – The Dream Team – Parts 1 & 2
In seventeenth century France Paris was becoming a sophisticated city when the Superintendent of the King’s Finances Nicolas Foucquet, conceived and completed the quintessential French country Chateau Vaux le Vicomte designed by his ‘dream team’ architect Louis Le Vau, designer Charles Le Brun and gardener Andre le Notre.
Day 19 - The Dream Team Part 3
Louis XIV set about renovating his father’s hunting lodge at Versailles seconding the talents of Foucquet’s ‘dream team’ to create a building project that ultimately influenced the evolution of all the arts in the western world. Louis Le Vau was succeeded on his death at Versailles by Jules Hardouin Mansart (1646-1708) nephew of Francois Mansart and his pupil, who added amongst others the superb Galerie des Glaces. Its interior was to become Charles le Brun’s triumph.
Day 19 – The Stuarts – Restoration – Part 2
Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660. The Great Plague and Great Fire changed the face of London and architect Sir Christopher Wren was given the task of re-designing London. Due to Charles’s influence England embraced the fashionable ‘Baroque’ style predominant at the French and Dutch courts.
Day 20 – England and its Great Treasure Houses
King James II threw the Great Seal of England into the Thames and fled England when Dutch Protestant rulers William and Mary of Orange claimed the throne of England. Around 1688 some of the grandest architectural gestures in England occur, including Chatsworth, a country palace wholly detached in plan and style from current practice and Castle Howard ‘a classical arcadia crowned by a classical dome’, which was created from the ‘bushes, bogs and briars of Yorkshire’.
3 CULTURED – Romantics, Reformers & Revolutionaries
Day 21 – Porcelain – Medici to Meissen, Chantilly to Chelsea
For centuries English and Europeans admired the translucent porcelain wares from China. They did their best to copy them in the tin glazed earthenwares of their cultures. Experimentation at Florence in Italy, Chantilly in France and Chelsea at London produced soft paste objects of beauty and desire. However the invention of hard paste porcelain at Meissen in Saxony (South East Germany) in the first decade of the eighteenth century changed the economies of Europe forever.
Day 22 – The Art of Pleasure is a Serious Business
In France during the reign of Louis XV [1710-1774], the ‘Well Beloved’, and the influence of his mistress, the delightful Mme. de Pompadour, a love for informality was reflected in fine art, interiors, porcelain, silver and sculpture. The style known as Rococo writhed its way into popularity. This was an age that cultivated taste’.
Day 23 – Palladian’s vs. the Goths
In England a passion for classical architecture and a perfect landscape spawned a proliferation of handsome villas some of which came complete with aesthetic ruins. Inspired by a renewed literary interest in the Middle Ages, the Gothick style emerged led by eccentric trendsetter parliamentarian Horace Walpole, with the help of his friends. It was Chinoiserie however that would become the ultimate outcome of a preference for pagodas, porcelains and personal priceless possessions passionately pursued.
Day 24 – Neoclassical Style in England
Scottish architect Robert Adam transformed the English prevailing Palladian fashion in architecture with a series of ‘romantic elegant variations on diverse classical originals’. Robert’s collaboration with cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, significant artists and renowned trades people meant that a very high standard of both design and workmanship was achieved in architecture and interiors.
Day 25 – Neoclassical Style in France
In France Louis XV’s architect Jacques Ange-Gabriel embraced the new classicism with his rendering of the extremely elegant Petit Trianon at Versailles. In its facade he espoused a return to rigour and austerity of style. We also examine the designs of architects Jacques Germain Soufflot and Claude Nicholas Ledoux, neo classical furniture and furnishings, highlighting that of Georges Jacob and Jean Henri Reisner
Day 26 – Creative Trendsetting Tradesmen
Skilled potter, Josiah Wedgwood established his factory at Staffordshire in England and called it Etruria. There he produced his most famous wares and patterns, including the famous Frog Service for Catherine the Great of Russia and the elegant black basalt pieces that included a copy of a Roman Vase. His contemporary, Mathew Boulton, became the world’s first industrial entrepreneur. His manufactory at Soho in Birmingham employed some 700 or 800 persons producing a wide variety of silver and ormolu goods.
Day 27 – Regency England
The Prince Regent in England led fashionable society and a great change from that of refined French and classical taste to exotic Eastern flavoured style furniture and objet d’art. From the alleys and garrets of Grub Street to behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden to life upstairs and down we examine London and England’s place on the world stage at the turn of the nineteenth century. It presents an enigma – an elegant society that was in reality drunken and dissolute while appearing successful, excessive, cultured and civilized.
Day 28 – Romantics, Reformers & Revolutionaries
In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century many European countries attained political maturity and this led to a romantic movement in painting, literature and music. Napoleon Bonaparte emerged as a hero of the French revolution and his letters reveal the complexity of his nature. He took many of the world’s foremost scholars to Egypt where they re-discovered this most influential of cultures and changed the course of history.
Day 29 – Beidermeier
Short lived from 1815 – 1830 this style came about following Napoleon’s rout and the re-drawing of the map in Europe. It represented a sense of hope for the ever expanding middle classes who were searching for simplicity, perfection and function combined with form, beauty and harmony. Every corner of the main living area was devoted to the pursuit of a happy and leisurely pastime reflecting the personal taste and functional needs of an industrious family
Day 30 – Great Ages of English Furniture 1660 – 1830
During the reign of the Stuart and Georgian Kings of England the furniture landscape changed a great deal. Four great timbers Oak, Walnut, Mahogany and Satinwood were used effectively, while exotic timbers flooding from expanding trade, provided visual relief. The role of the joiner from medieval times was surpassed by that of the cabinetmaker. He was a new age craftsman of consummate skill in new techniques such as dovetailing, different styles of veneering, marquetry, parquetry, japanning and lacquering. Shapes changed too, while upholders now worked with cabinetmakers to add comfort to convenience.
Coming April 2012
4 CREATIVE – Courage & Conviction
Day 31 – The New Rome
America, Lady Liberty, Land of the Free and Brave. Is this the new Rome? We examine the architecture of freedom; highlighting that powerful advocate of liberty Thomas Jefferson, who, as a ‘silent member of Congress’, drafted the document that delivered America, its independence. We discuss his passions, pursuits, trip to Paris and building his dream house Monticello.
Day 32 – In the Name of Progress
During the reign of Alexandrina Victoria (1819-1901) Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and from 1876 Empress of India, a rise in wealth and status was possible through expanding trade. Great leaps forward in science and technology enabled former merchants, tradesmen and people from virtually all walks of life to amass vast fortunes overnight and build great houses to match.
Day 33 – The Cottage Orneé
The Great Exhibition of 1851 showcased English achievements to the world with a bewildering array of style choices. However it was the simple cottage orneé by the sea, or in the country, that stole all hearts becoming an enduring image for that of a peaceful English rural idyll and was transposed to the English-speaking world.
Day 34 – Master and the Disciples
The predominant Gothic revival style led by Augustus Welby Pugin was the choice for those seeking to associate themselves with intellectual or artistic learning and academic correctness. Pugin became a master of the style, which sprang out of England and ingratiated itself on its colonies via many of his disciples including John Loughborough Pearson at Brisbane in Australia, where the last Gothic Revival Cathedral in the world was completed in 2008.
Day 35 – The China Trade
Let us now…travel into Cathay, so you may learn something of its grandeur and… treasures said Marco Polo at the turn of the fourteenth century, inspiring the notion China was a land, unlike any other, one that found fertile ground in the western mind. By the nineteenth century the so-called China Trade was in earnest with England, Holland, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, France, Australia and America all involved.
Day 36 – Meditating on Modernism
In the late nineteenth century Europe and England was a melting pot of ideas about art and morals, beauty and truth, man and nature, aesthetics and socialism. A whole new coterie of protagonists believed beauty should be expressed through science, trade and industry using exciting new materials and the very latest technology.
Day 37 – Land of the Free
The Stock Market crash of 1929 became the great divide between the inheritance of European design and the onset of American design. A democracy based on man’s individualism meant renewing his relationship with nature, eloquently expressed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright for a client ‘who loved the beautiful site…and…liked to listen to the waterfall’. He cantilevered their house over cascading water, echoing the style of the rock ledges that supported it.
Day 38 – Culture in the Colonies
When in 1788, New South Wales was founded the Gothick style was established in England demanding an emotional, rather than intellectual response in the viewer. Adapting to the new climate was a challenge for all and there were many influences on the development of Australian dwellings, including ‘the golden decade’, when the aspirations of great pastoral landholders and merchants were realized in great Greek classical revival mansions.
Day 39 – Federating the Future
By the turn of the twentieth century in Australia new styles of architecture and interiors reflected a desire to, not only keep abreast of the times in Europe, but also the equally influential America, who heralded the promise of better things to come. We will examine how Australia’s historical, social, economic and geographic conditions impacted on design and style up to and including both world wars.
Day 40 – The World – A Crucible for Change
In the last 50 years architects have designed and built some of the most interesting buildings in the world. We discuss significant buildings around the world designed and developed since World War 11 and contemplate the future of design development on a global basis as creativity and culture come together with new technology to imagine a whole new world environment.
Coming November 2012
Sydney Cr. Phillip Black said when he completed the course ‘Now I don’t just look I see’.
JOIN US AND THE WORLD WILL NEVER LOOK QUITE THE SAME AGAIN
For further Course Information click here
Course Outline © The Culture Concept 2011
Written & Presented: Carolyn McDowall
On Line Producers: Carolyn McDowall & Paul McDowall
The Culture Concept Pty Ltd ABN 61 125 381 991
The Culture Concept reserves the right to postpone, cancel or change any part of the published program.
Email: info@thecultureconcept.com
Web www.thecultureconcept.com
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Course Outline”
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