Introduction

“The adventures first. Explanations take such a dreadful time.”
—(The Gryphon, Alice in Wonderland, ch. 10)

Adventures in Wonderland

The illustrated lectures in these four series offer a fresh introduction to some of the greatest works by the greatest Italian artists: Michelangelo in Rome, Titian in Venice; and, before their time, Duccio in Siena and Giotto in Florence.

Everything is based on the telling of a story. Your interest will be sustained and your emotions engaged as you follow a sacred or secular drama, unfolding scene by scene on the walls of a single chapel or state-room in or near one of the four named cities, which you will be able to visit in person.

You will be able to combine the experience of going to Italy for a cultural holiday, reading a novel in an armchair, shopping online at Harrod’s, watching a documentary on TV, joining the Vice-Chancellor at a public lecture in Cambridge, and revising for a degree in History of Art.

You are being offered a series of free ‘safaris in Wonderland’. The next section gives you some simple tips on preparing your ‘vehicle’, and ends by ‘teleporting’ you straight into your first adventure.

First steps

This site has been designed to be enjoyed in many ways, but on your first ‘adventure’, please do yourself the favour of engaging with your chosen unit as a whole. Skim, where you feel inclined, but don’t skip. Each lecture takes the form of a structured commentary on a carefully chosen sequence of images. There will always be an argument to follow as well as the plot of a story. You won’t be acquiring snippets of information to use in a pub quiz. But you will be learning—painlessly and by example—how to look at any painting or sculpture from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. (To misquote a favourite aphorism, you will not be ‘much better informed’, but you will be somewhat ‘the wiser’.)

The site should be legible on almost any device, but it is designed for at least a large tablet or small laptop, a screen size of 13 inches or so. If you can use a bigger screen, such as a desktop monitor or television, then the details of the images will be easier to see.

The lecture should be divided into pages like PowerPoint slides, most with two columns. If this is not what you see, try to:

Maximise your browser window, or even better, make it full-screen; and
Ensure that the zoom level is set to 100%.

To turn the pages, we recommend using the up and down arrows on your keyboard, if you have one.

On a second viewing, feel free to pause and enlarge the images, almost ignoring the words. But during the first trip, you’ll need help with acclimatisation, map-reading skills and local knowledge—and for that to be effective, you need to stay with the guide and keep up your momentum.

Your first lecture

We suggest you start in the Sistine Chapel.

Once you’ve experienced a lecture, you might like to know a little more about how the site was conceived and designed. Read on…

Two Explanations

Site design

Each lecture is divided into “slides”, designed to look like a PowerPoint slide (but viewed relatively close-up, with denser text), or like the double spread of a generously-proportioned glossy coffee-table book.

The all-important image will normally be on the right and the commentary on the left. The text may fill its column or be very short indeed, but it will always be related to the picture or diagram you’re looking at alongside.

The layout of each slide is determined by the need for the words to be comfortably legible at arm’s length when the lecture is being enjoyed on a typical laptop screen, just as if you were reading a novel.

(Actually, you couldn’t do better than sit in an armchair with your head comfortably supported and the screen literally in your lap.)

The impact of the images will be greater on a desktop computer (21 inches or more) or a television. Conversely, a tablet will disappoint you and the screen of a smartphone will be simply too small. (You won’t shudder at the terribilità of the Sistine Chapel if you’re squinting at a playing card.)

Why “lectures”?

After some hesitation, we decided to keep referring to each of the units in the four series as a lecture (rather than a chapter, or an article, or a tour), for several reasons.

They did in fact all begin life as Open Lectures in the biggest auditorium in the University of Cambridge. The original audiences were of all disciplines and ages. None of them were specialists but they were eager to learn. They wanted to be enlightened as well as entertained. They expected something solid to chew on and digest at leisure.

Everything that was vital to the success of the public lectures has been preserved in the long and loving transformation of the original handwritten notes, which accompanied the projection of 35mm slides in a darkened theatre, where the audience’s eyes could be steered across two colossal screens by the voice of an energetic speaker and the red spot of a laser pointer.

So, by keeping the word ‘lecture’, we are preparing you for the content and style of a website that meets the same standards you would expect of four short but scholarly books published by a university press.

Each lecture is a substantial piece of around 8,000 words, written in simple colloquial English, immediately intelligible, but not afraid of big concepts or foreign words. There was and is no dumbing-down; but there is a lot of energetic limbering-up.

Let John Keats have the last word:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Patrick Boyde, Cambridge, November 2025