The Mirror Of History

Featured Speaker: Linda Blair, M.A.

 
The goal of this class is to illuminate the cultural tensions of our own times – Presidential politics and overseas turmoil and tragedy – by investigating historical parallels.  We will examine two vastly different, yet contemporary, societies – the Italian Renaissance and the courtly culture of Burgundy – to understand how each responded to existential threats to their most basic values.  The threats that challenged both were an emerging secularism and Humanism, but their solutions were vastly different. In Renaissance Italy, medieval art forms were forced to yield to the values of the rediscovered Classical world, whereas north of the Alps, the medieval dream lingered, and was brought to perfection.

The first class will trace the historic causes of this transformational epoch.  The Medieval centuries had run their course, upended by the rise of cities, the growth of a merchant class, and technological innovation.  This forced both societies to choose between opposing sets of values - medieval versus modern, piety versus worldliness.  The Italian solution to this cultural collision was a wholesale rejection of one thousand years of spiritually rich religious art in order to reclaim its more ancient patrimony, the secularism of the Classical world.   
 

Presenter Biography

Linda Blair has taught art history for many years, at the La Jolla Athenaeum, the Osher Institute at UC San Diego, and in the East, where she was a docent a25t The Cloisters. She earned her BA at Mills College and her MA at USD. She has been a popular and eloquent lecturer at Osher for more than a decade.  She is a co-founder of the UCSD Town and Gown Society, which raises undergraduate scholarship funds for deserving students. 

Coordinator: Steve Clarey