ARTS + ARCHITECTURE

Arts + Architecture [A+A] international education travel program focused on the allied arts of architecture, drawing, painting, and sculpture. This travel and studio intensive program recognizes the long-standing tradition and value of the physical experience of travel and drawing research as an integral part of a designer’s education. In short, we call it Drawing Inspiration.

The A+A program focuses on evaluating and understanding the historical, social, cultural, and physical aspects of this particularly rich urban European context through design, research, and, documentation. Field trips throughout Italy and Europe further enhance your educational experience. A+A is led by SEÁN MCARDLE with special lectures and tours provided by visiting architects and local Italian educators. 

The A+A program commences with arrival in Rome visiting important monuments and museums of the cultural and political capital of the Roman world. The A+A program will be based in Florence, the center of intellectual life during the 14th and 16th centuries providing the ideal location to study the traditions and innovative work made by Renaissance artists and architects in their own respective centuries who shaped our current architectural consciousness and the collective built environment. The program also includes drawing research visits to Venice, Vicenza, and Carrara.

ARTS + ARCHITECTURE / DRAWING INSPIRATION

Program I Spring 2025 / Florence + Veneto + Venice

The A+A 2024 Calendar Year program includes 3 weeks in Italy from late May to early June 2025.

The A+A program commences in Rome prior to traveling to Florence for studio orientation. Studio classes start at 9 a.m. each day and travel on field trips generally begins at 7:30 a.m. or earlier. Most afternoons and evenings are typically self-directed. Attendees should expect a “full-time” commitment to the program by being self-disciplined to maximize one's own experience. We believe in Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) statement “I am still learning…the greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

On studio days, the coursework will include morning instruction in topics related to traditions of architecture including hand-drawing, perspective studies, proportion, history, innovations, and materials, and methods. After lunch, students will have the afternoons to apply the morning lessons either in the studio or in your sketchbook in the rich context of Florence. The A+A program will also include introductions to figurative drawing, painting, anatomy, and interconnected relation between the art.

All students will be required to keep a daily sketchbook. Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 - 1519) started with journals when he was 26 years old and continued to write an average of 3 pages a day producing well over 20,000 pages of notes and sketches spanning across 50 different notebooks related to whatever topics interested him – architecture, proportion, perspective, painting, philosophy, landscape, geography, geology and inventions, and other topics.

Florence

The historical center of the city of Florence has a long and splendid history. Originally founded on the site of an early Etruscan settlement, the present city was established by Julius Caesar in 59 B.C. Florence became a great mercantile and banking center during the medieval period and is recognized as being one of the most important European cities of its time. Credited as the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance, Florence has often been termed “the Athens of the Middle Ages.” The city enjoyed great renown under the Medici, who attracted brilliant artists, architects, philosophers, and scholars to their court. Works of great masters, such as Giotto, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Michelangelo were created here and can be seen in the various museums in the city. Great architecture abounds with masterpieces like the Florence Cathedral (the Duomo), the Palazzo Pitti, Santa Croce, the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the Bargello, and the Ponte Vecchio. The historic center of Florence has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Florence Museums Tours

Uffizi / Palazzo Pitti / Boboli Gardens / Gallerie dell'Accademia / Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Bargello / Orsanmichele / Basilica of San Lorenzo, Medici Chapel Sagrestia Nuova / Ospedale degli Innocenti by Fillipo Brunelleschi / Santa Maria Novella Santa Croce / Pazzi Chapel

Arts + Architecture Drawing Inspiration Tour / Florence Baptistery

Filippo Brunelleschi: Architect and the birth of the Renaissance

Architect Filippo Brunelleschi’s (1387 - 1446) rediscovery of linear perspective had a profound impact on early Renaissance Artists including Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Artists in the early 15th century had learned to portray the human form with faithful accuracy through careful observation and anatomical dissection but did not have the knowledge of representation of physical space until Brunelleschi shared his understanding of perspective by a painting demonstration of the Baptistery in Florence in 1420. 

Arts + Architecture Drawing Inspiration Tour /

Sagrestia Nuova (New Sacristy), Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy.

Michelangelo: The Sculptor, Painter and Architect and His Legacy in Florence

Michelangelo always pushed the limits of the possible, infusing his art with his soul and intellect. He was often more concerned with the exploration and solution of an artistic problem than with the finished work. One of his greatest and most influential projects in Florence, left incomplete when he departed for Rome in 1534, is the burial chapel, or New Sacristy, in the Medici church of San Lorenzo. The chapel includes a number of greater-than-life-sized marble statues, among them the famous personifications of the four times of day (Day, Night, Dawn, and Dusk).

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is unique in the history of world art as the only man to attain the highest level in the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. He was also an accomplished poet. Michelangelo’s work represented a new figurative style that the painter and writer Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) called maniera (Mannerism), characterized by expressive power and complex, yet elegant, form. Among the sculptor’s most singular innovations is the figura serpentinata (serpentine figure), in which a small head tops a massive muscular torso and tapering thighs, and the body dynamically twists so that its musculature can be viewed from many angles. This concept, its implied motion augmented when viewed from all sides, continued to influence sculptors and painters throughout the late Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Michelangelo's sculptures in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo can be viewed in terms of history, technique, and style, and their particular language and historical context analyzed objectively, however, the emotions aroused in those seeing them for the first time or tenth time can not be put into words, you must experience it in your own time. My advice is to take the necessary time to draw inspiration that will have a profound effect on the viewer, who sees them, not as an objective reality, but as a reflection of his own expectations and artistic desires.

Image: Architecture and Sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1521–24.

Drawing Inspiration by Program Director Seán McArdle