Art History Cultural Study Tour Holidays
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Study Tour status: Limited Availability
After more than six hundred years of protecting Rome’s northern frontier against barbarian incursions, the city of Aquileia was besieged, conquered and razed to the ground by Attila the Hun in 452. At the time of its destruction, Aquileia was one of the largest and most important cities in the Roman world, and its imperial splendour reveals itself in the exquisite fourth-century mosaic floor that survives under its eleventh-century basilica. The ruins of its once thriving harbour and the fragmentary treasures in its archaeological museum, one of Ita...
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Study Tour status: Limited Availability
Venice’s artistic treasures range from priceless gold mosaics and enamelled artefacts of the city’s Byzantine beginnings to the grandiose spectacles and festive decorations of the age of the Grand Tour. Our Study Tour will give you a thorough – and thoroughly enjoyable – art historical introduction to La Serenissima. Our journey back in time will start in the eleventh century with visits to the cathedral of Torcello and the basilica of San Marco. From there we will trace the development of Venetian Gothic and Early Renaissance art and archi...
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Study Tour status: Limited Availability
Rising majestically on the first slopes of the Colli Albani and the Parco dei Castelli Romani to the south-east of Rome, Frascati is famous for its wines and its villas. Since Antiquity, this area of fertile volcanic soil and a fresh, salubrious climate has been a favourite location of villeggiatura, first of Ancient Roman aristocrats, and then of members of the papal court. From our base in Frascati, we will go on excursions to some of the most beautiful sites in the vicinity of the Eternal City, into the Latin and Alban Hills and beyond, ...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
According to Giorgio Vasari, the seeds of the Renaissance were sown when Giotto di Bondone broke with the Byzantine tradition prevailing in thirteenth-century Italian art, developing a revolutionary naturalism in place of the hidebound severity of mediaeval artists. Giotto’s treatment of line and volume, the Vasarian story continues, led directly to Masaccio, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and to Florence becoming the acknowledged centre of the artistic world. Vasari’s biased account has been steadily unpicked by art historians over the centuries, but G...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
 During the late Middle Ages the trading towns of Flanders enjoyed a period of unprecedented prosperity, their wealth founded on a thriving textile industry and international commerce. Although from 1384 officially subject to the Dukes of Burgundy and from 1477 to the House of Habsburg, the Flemish urban communes proudly held their own, playing a pivotal role in Europe’s early modern economy. Their sophisticated cosmopolitan culture manifested itself in impressive civic and religious buildings and breathtakingly beautiful paintings, works of art rivalling those of the city states of Italy of th...
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Study Tour status: Please enquire
In Association with Warwickshire Art Fund
In 1887 the poet Stéphen Liégeard invented the term Côte d’Azur, referring to the stretch of coastline between Toulon and San Remo. He thus baptised an earthly paradise which for its natural beauty, sparkling luminosity and magical colours – above all the inimitable eponymous hue of this part of the Mediterranean – is hard to beat. Since the 19th century the land of the French Riviera has been a favourite destination of aristocratic, literati and glitterati visitors alike: Queen Victoria, Edith Wharton, Coco Cha...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Sparkling enigmatically like a dark sapphire, Lake Como is arguably Europe’s most beautiful lake – and certainly its deepest. Dramatically set against the steep and forbidding Italian and Swiss Alps in its austere northern reaches which betray the water’s glacial origins, towards its south end the lake acquires warmer, gentler prospects with stylish holiday villages nestling along the shore and innumerable villas perched on terraced slopes. Situated at the southern tip of the lake’s ‘left leg’, the lively little city of Como, birthplace in 23 AD of Pliny the Elder and in 1745 of Alessan...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
The sheer span of Armenian history is difficult to comprehend. The land called Armenia appears next to Colchis and Parthia in ancient maps, was a Hellenistic vassal state, and later a province of Rome. It was fought over by Byzantines, Arabs, Mamelukes, and the Mongol Golden Horde. It suffered conquest and periodic slaughter by the empires of Persians, Russians, and, most notoriously, Ottomans. Yet, despite its precarious position surrounded by powerful and hostile neighbours, or perhaps because of it, Armenian culture has been uniquely independent: the Armenian language has i...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Franconia, Bavaria’s northern half, is adorned with probably the highest concentration of parks and gardens in all Germany. They are certainly the most beautiful. They represent a vital part of the region’s recreational infrastructure and range from monastic herb beds to formal Baroque palace gardens, from undulating ‘English’ landscapes to town parks and contemporary layouts of the Landesgartenschauen, annual horticultural exhibitions hosted by each of Germany’s federal states.
This new Art Pursuits Abroad Study Tour spends two nights in the l...
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Study Tour status: Limited Availability
 Alongside his contemporary Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) is regarded as the most influential artist of the German Renaissance. His paintings – of sacred Madonnas and louche Venuses alike – enjoy critical acclaim in major exhibitions and can be admired in leading museums around the world. We will retrace the career of this ‘pictor celerrimus’, an amazingly fast-working businessman, whose commercial sense and talent for diplomacy won him commissions from both Catholic and Protestant patrons. Cranach was Franconian by birth, though it is in Thuringia, one of the principal hi...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
On its way through Bavaria the Danube runs through narrow rocky gorges, densely forested landscapes, past spectacular monuments and busy market towns. At the river’s northernmost point lies the great Imperial Free City and Episcopal centre of Regensburg, a rich trading hub to which the river brought goods from the Balkans and the Orient. The old town is brimming with artistic and architectural highlights, from Roman remains to the Gothic cathedral surmounted by 19th-century neo-Gothic spires, but it is the virtually intact mediaeval townscape, listed as Unesco World Heritage, which make...
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Study Tour status: Limited Availability
"Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with your spiritual eye, then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react on others from the outside inwards."
Like no other, the deeply moving landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich exemplify the German Romantic Age. Born in 1774 in the Pomeranian harbour town of Greifswald, Friedrich studied in Copenhagen until 1798, when he settled in Dresden. There he led a quiet life, interrupted only by excursions to the mountains south-east of the city or to th...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
“It is now infinitely beautiful here. I was very moved last night as we strolled through the lakes, canals and woods by how the gods have allowed the Prince to create a dream around himself….”
Thus wrote Goethe in 1778. Twenty years earlier, the Prince, the 18-year-old Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, and his friend and adviser Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff had embarked on their first educational tour to England, followed by a Grand Tour to France, Italy and again England, journeys which were to prove inspirational: On his return home, the Prince started to make changes to hi...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
With shores in three countries – Germany, Switzerland and Austria – Lake Constance (in German 'Bodensee') occupies an enchanted spot in the heart of Western Europe. Beyond the southern shore, the Swiss Alps rise to glacial heights, while gentle slopes with rich vineyards and luscious orchards fringe the German northern side. The combination of outstanding natural beauty and fertile agricultural lands have given this area, inhabited since the Bronze Age, the epithet 'God's Garden'. Moreover, the lake's gateway position has led to the development of august abbeys and flourishing towns alo...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
 In its heyday during the renaissance, the hill town of Urbino experienced a cultural flowering beyond compare. This was, above all, the achievement of Federico da Montefeltro (1422-82) who made his fortune as condottiere and consolidated his fame as duke of this small principality in the north of the Italian Marche. During his enlightened reign of forty years, Federico forged alliances with the kings of Naples, the dukes of Milan and the popes in Rome, and his political kudos was such that King Edward IV of England made him a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. The ruler of Urbin...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Less glamorous than Lake Como and less developed than Lake Garda, Lake Maggiore is perhaps the most idyllic of the Italian lakes. Nestled at the foot of the Swiss Alps as they descend towards the Po Valley, Maggiore shares its shoreline between Lombardy in the east and Piedmont in the west. The lake’s worldwide fame rests on the latter, specifically the area of the Borromean Gulf, extending from the busy resort of Stresa, dominated by truly grand hotels, to the beautiful lakeside village of Pallanza, which has a more intimate feel. Between them lie the magical floating garden terraces o...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Tales of the Silk Road have enticed and beguiled the West for centuries, and images of the ‘mysterious east’, numinous, exotic and dangerously seductive, lingered on in the western imagination long after the overland trade route had disintegrated. Even today, the six central Asian ‘-stans’ are a poorly-understood region well off the European radar, and Uzbekistan is the ‘-stan’ nonpareil, being bordered by the other five. But Uzbekistan’s geographical and political isolation, for better or worse, has slowed the inroads of modernity, and here the glories of the Silk Road have withstood t...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Claimed, conquered and reconquered by kings, emperors and generals for more than five centuries, Alsace is neither entirely French nor wholly German, its distinctive culture influenced as much by its middle-Frankish past as by its larger neighbours to the east and west. For centuries one the most contested borders in Europe, in 1945 Alsace changed hands for the fourth time in just 75 years. Today, however, the region at the centre of western Europe seems to embody the transformation of international relations since World War Two. Its largest city, Strasbourg, our base for this...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Verona, at the crossroads between North and South, on the border between the Veneto and Lombardy, is still best-known in the Anglophone world for its Shakespearean connotations. But despite the crowds that assemble before Juliet’s balcony, Verona’s true highlights are its magnificent ancient monuments and outstanding mediaeval and Renaissance art and architecture. The city enjoyed considerable status and patronage within the Roman Empire, as demonstrated by its colossal Arena, built in the 1st century AD. Subsequently, Verona was a major centre of the Italian Lombards, and the basilica ...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Andrea Palladio is one of the most influential architects of all time. To a large extent, his enduring fame was the result of his publication in 1570 of the Quattro Libri dell'Architettura which made his designs available to architects all over the world. But it is Palladio’s homeland, the rich countryside surrounding Padua, Vicenza and Verona, where we can admire his most famous buildings: the stately villas of the Veneto. From the middle of the 14th century, wealthy Venetians and mainland aristocrats alike wanted grand buildings from which to overlook and manage their vast fa...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
In 1579 the northern provinces of the Low Countries joined forces against their Spanish Habsburg overlords. In the 1580s they united to form a Republic. Spain may not have recognised this new state until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, but this refusal does not hide the fact that Holland, the country's leading province, had become the cultural, political and economic centre of the United Provinces, and ultimately a world power. The ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Haarlem and Delft, were international hubs from where the Dutch — expert seafarers and skilled mapmakers — develo...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
According to the 16th-century writer Francesco Sansovino, Venice's name derived from the Latin 'veni etiam' which could be translated as 'come again'! On this 'sequel' to our classic Genius of Venice Study Tour, we will explore sights off the beaten track. Explore Venice's formidable political and military centres of command: from the Ducal Palace's magistrates offices, inquisition chambers and cells where Casanova was imprisoned, to the dockyards of the Arsenal which mass-produced the ships that ensured the Serenissima's hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries. We will visi...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
 The casual visitor to Rome could be forgiven for imagining that the city's history ground to a halt with the Fall of the Empire in the West in 476 and that it only re-ignited when Michelangelo took a paintbrush to the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1508. But between Roman Antiquity and the Renaissance lie a thousand years of early Christian and mediaeval history whose complex and prestigious monuments are the objects of this new Art Pursuits Abroad Study Tour. They may lie concealed behind and between layers of earlier and later epochs, but nowhere is the period between the pagan world o...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Constantinople and Istanbul — two names for one city, capital of the mighty Byzantine and Ottoman empires, a city where East meets West, astride two continents, Europe and Asia. Its shores are lapped by the Sea of Marmara, the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, and its monuments are ranged over seven hills. Minarets and domes dominate the famous skyline and a stroll through the streets reveals the city's diverse and magnificent heritage. Hagia Sophia, great cathedral of Byzantium, with magnificent marbles and mosaics vies with Ottoman mosques clad in beautiful Iznik tiles, the Topkap&...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Master painter, printmaker, goldsmith, art theorist and humanist scholar—Albrecht Dürer embodied the idea of the Renaissance man. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was driven by an obsession to know everything, and observed and absorbed the world like no other Northern artist before him. He travelled widely between Strasbourg, Basel, Antwerp and Venice, recording his experiences in letters, diaries, treatises and, of course, in paintings, prints and in jawdroppingly beautiful watercolours. In his hometown of Nürnberg Dürer was one of the ‘in-crowd’ of intellectuals and patricians. Here he cond...
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Study Tour status: Places Available
Both monumental and intimate, and somehow more than the sum of its extraordinary parts, Prague wears its thousand years of history like a finely cut cloak. Alone among the great capitals of central Europe, it has been practically undamaged by war or natural disaster, a city that seems to exist outside of time even as cataclysmic events played out just beyond its walls. This fairytale impression, however, is inaccurate. A tour of Prague is a tour through European intellectual history. For centuries it was the heart of Mitteleuropean culture, a turbul...
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