Visions · Online course
Anima
Mundi
Four meetings on art in Florence, from the thirteenth century to the end of the sixteenth.
Dates and enrolmentThe course
A journey through four centuries of art and culture in Florence, from Byzantine icons to Giotto, from Donatello and Botticelli to Michelangelo and the twilight of the Renaissance. Four meetings devoted to the works, artists, places and ideas that transformed not only the way the world was represented, but our very capacity to imagine it.
The guiding thread will be the Anima Mundi: the ancient idea of a living world in which bodies, animals, plants, waters, stones and images all share in the same fabric. Art history will remain the point of departure; around the works, literature, philosophy, myth, gardens and landscape will enter the conversation.
Programme
01
Thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries
The Theft of the Soul
Byzantine tradition, Cimabue, Nicola Pisano and Giotto will be at the centre of a meeting on the origins of Italian art. Through icons, ancient sarcophagi and the routes of the Mediterranean, we will see not only the forms of art change, but the world they make visible. Saint Francis of Assisi, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio will give voice and shape to a cultural revolution that recasts the relationship between soul, body and nature.
02
The early
fifteenth century
Cosimo’s Garden
Antiquity comes back to life in the images and ideas of the early fifteenth century. From Donatello and Masaccio to Fra Angelico, from Brunelleschi to Leon Battista Alberti, we will retrace a period of extraordinary flourishing in the arts and in knowledge. Palazzo Medici and Cosimo de’ Medici’s garden will be the magnetic field of the story: a space in which sculpture, philosophy, politics, power and the energy of the body meet and transform one another.
03
The late
fifteenth century
Pink Madness
Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century seems to reach the height of an ascent that could not last forever. Beneath the apparent serenity of the verse of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Poliziano, a tension can already be felt, one that Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo and the young Michelangelo will carry into images. Amid metamorphosis, eros, heresy and madness, the golden age of the Renaissance begins to crack, allowing conspiracies, exile and the stake to emerge.
04
The
sixteenth century
The Anti-Renaissance
The sixteenth century offers an opportunity to dismantle the image of an orderly and perfect Renaissance. Michelangelo’s bodies, Rosso Fiorentino’s feverish colours and Benvenuto Cellini’s molten passions tell of a refined, unstable and violent society in which alchemy and magic remain living tools for reading and transforming matter.
From the collections of Francesco I de’ Medici to Buontalenti’s architecture, from grottoes to the garden of Pratolino, we will follow this restless matter to the threshold of the seventeenth century, when the dream of reviving ancient tragedy will give birth, in Florence itself, to a new art form: opera.
Practical information
How it works
Format
4 live online meetings
Duration
90 minutes, 6:30–8:00 pm Italian time
Platform
Google Meet
Participants
From 4 to 12 people
English edition
10, 17 and 24 November
1 December 2026
Italian edition
12, 19 and 26 January
2 February 2027
€140for the complete course
A recording will be sent after each meeting. The course also includes handouts and a bibliography.
To take part, write to me and indicate which edition you would like to attend. You will receive the necessary information and a link for payment by card. Your place will be confirmed once payment has been received.
You may cancel your enrolment and receive a full refund up to 7 days before the course begins. This does not affect any statutory right of withdrawal. After that date, the fee is non-refundable; you will still receive the recordings and course materials. If the course does not reach the minimum number of participants or is cancelled, the amount paid will be refunded in full.
Write to take partA weekend in and around Florence
At the end of the course, we may meet for a weekend at a historic residence in the countryside around Florence. It will be an opportunity to get to know one another, discuss the themes that emerged during the meetings and encounter them in the places from which they arose, through visits and walks in Florence and the surrounding landscape.
The weekend will be optional and priced separately from the online course. The programme, venue and fee will be defined according to participants’ interest.
Further reading