The Flowering of the British Renaissance

Speaker: Leslie Primo
7 March 2023

We have all heard about the great achievements of the Italian Renaissance, but there is little acknowledgement of the artistic events that took place in Britain at the same time.

This lecture will bring back to life that period from the late 15th century through to the early 17th century and will explore the tumultuous creative outpourings of artists that are now all but lost to us.

This lecture will explore the successes, conflicts and tensions between indigenous and incoming artists and will examine what relationship, if any, existed between the practices of the native artists and their foreign counterparts. Could the native art be said to have a unique character of its own or was it derivative and thus led by the incoming art of the day? Just how distinctive was the art they produced, how did it fare when compared to the contemporaneous work of foreign artists, how direct was the competition and was there even some interaction resulting in shared artistic knowledge and thus heritage among these diverse communities of artists? We will discover The Flowering of the British Renaissance.

Profile
Leslie Primo is an art historian, author, broadcaster, and graduate of Birkbeck, University College, with an MA in Renaissance studies. He lectured at the National Gallery for 18 years and has appeared on the BBC speaking on Michelangelo and presenting on JMW Turner. He contributed to the Oxford Companion Guide to Black British History, and has a forthcoming Thames & Hudson book called, The Foreigners that Invented British Art. He currently teaches art history at Imperial College and lectures for the Royal Academy.