Postcard from America - Case Studies - Art History Abroad - Art History Abroad

Emily came on the AHA Gap Year Course in 2006 just after she'd graduated from the University of Wisconsin. She wrote on her return;

It was the little things, the things that weren't on the timetable or planned out that made the trip exceptional. Of course there were the usual amazing things: seeing Michelangelo's David in person, he's much bigger than you would expect, or seeing Botticelli's Birth of Venus is like running into a celebrity. To be able to stand beneath a sculpture is so different from any photo in a textbook. The architecture is literally breathtaking. I hate maths, yet I have become infatuated with the geometry-obsessed architect Borromini. And poetry sounds so much sweeter when you are standing in Ezra Pound's flat or floating by a location from one of Henry James' novels. And I can't even start to describe what it is like to be in the Vatican with only sixteen other people and four security guards. But it was the experiences that I wasn't expecting or looking forward to that made all the difference. On our first day in Rome we went to a small convent just because it was in the neighbourhood. A nun passed us a key through a revolving window (she couldn't risk touching someone from the outside) and we were allowed into a small room that was the equivalent of the Sistine Chapel in the 12th century. Another favourite moment was in Venice as I was scrounging for postcards in the gift shop of San Giorgio Maggiore. I noticed one that was a painting by Carpaccio whom we had studied a few days before.

We hadn't seen this painting in the church, so the tutor asked the gift shop guy about it. He led us up a back staircase into a private room, probably used as an office for the priests. There was the Carpaccio painting, and even better, in the corner, just leaning against the wall, not even in a frame, was a Tintoretto painting. It was these kinds of things that made each day more than just a tourist trip. To enter a church to see a floor to ceiling Tintoretto painting that even the tutor had never seen before, helped to put it in perspective. The excitement and thoughtfulness of his face as he looked at this painting in person for the first time, is probably what he saw on all of us everyday.
Also, I have never studied art history and now I am able to casually say names like Tintoretto and Carpaccio and know what I'm talking about.

Emily Hochman is currently studying at Loyola University in Chicago