Travel Courses in Art

Abstract

From the mediaeval pilgrimages grew the first guidebooks dealing with the “Wonders of Rome.” Artists, too, traveled in order to see art in places other than their home towns, more frequently so since the Renaissance. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries conceived of the idea that traveling was part of a polite education—a nobleman's or a gentleman's education—and thereby created the type of the sightseeing tourist and his standard itinerary, called the Grand Tour. In the diaries of these gentleman travelers art became an habitual item, frequently mentioned, though it had to share its place of interest with a variety of other studies and divertissements. More specifically, at this point, the education of artists began to follow the same course. The continental journeys of Rubens and Van Dyck in many ways resemble those of the traveling cavaliers of their time, only that their emphasis was more exclusively on art. From then on the foundation of Royal Academies, mainly the leading academies in Paris and ...