If you want to get ahead of the game, you can pledge a paid subscription now:. When I was 16, a new teacher joined our school called Mr Walton. This was a pretty fancy school in central London, the sort that has its own archaic names for things like the dining room and all the different year groups, so we had the option to study History of Art 1 ; this new guy Walton, straight out of Cambridge and barely six years older than us, was going to teach the class a paper on 15 th - and 16 th -century Florence and Venice.
As you might have guessed, the Italian Renaissance is as close to an apotheosis as the subject gets to one. Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Titian, San Marco — these are the bread and butter of all budding art historians, basically the academic art-world answer to the Shakespearean canon or the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven.
Popular but still very important stuff, in other words. Mr Walton was, I think, a little nervous at the beginning of his first lesson. In fact, I think we all were. History of Art was a sixth form subject, and a very female one at that — there were only two boys including me in the class, and eight or nine girls — and this was our first class, on the first day of the year, in the first year of mixed school.
Meaning 80 per cent of the class was totally new, and almost nobody knew anyone else, and nobody had ever studied the subject before. Anyway — our new teacher began by artfully sketching out the civic context for the Renaissance in Florence. The city, he told us, had been a republic, or more accurately an oligarchy like the modern-day USA. This arrangement, Mr Walton explained, led to huge competition between these prominent families to outdo one another in public displays of patronage and civic goodwill towards the people of Florence, as well as a competing interest in fashions inspired by classical Rome.
I think someone had taught Mr Walton not incorrectly that to be a good teacher you had to engage your pupils rather than talk at them. That modern pedagogy had a certain call-and-response rhythm to it. And so, throughout this lesson, which was actually very well put together, he peppered his Powerpoint presentation with illustrations and examples of buildings, sculptures and portraits. Every time he reached a new slide, he would pause and ask if anyone knew what it showed.
