Jonathan Jones' Earthly Delights

Join us for a thought provoking evening with Jonathan Jones, art critic for the Guardian newspaper. He is the author of several books including The Lost Battles: Leonardo, The Loves of the Artists: Art and Passion in the Renaissance, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Jones has also been a member of the jury for the 2009 Turner Prize and has appeared in the BBC series Private Life of a Masterpiece.

Look forward to uncovering the nature of the Renaissance; how its artists thought and practised, its core concepts persisted, and its impact evolved.

Earthly Delights rekindles the Renaissance as a seismic change in European mentalities, in a panoramic history that encompasses Florence and Bruges, London and Nuremberg. Artists from northern as well as southern Europe, including Leonardo, Bosch, Bruegel and Titian, star in a captivating and beautifully illustrated narrative that sets their lives against a period of convulsive change across a continent that was finding itself as it 'discovered' the world.

Art critic and writer Jonathan Jones tells the story of Renaissance artists as pioneers, adventurers and 'geniuses'. Albrecht Durer gazes with wonder on Aztec art in Brussels in 1520, Leonardo da Vinci tries to perfect a flying machine, Hieronymus Bosch finds inspiration in West African ivory carvings imported by the Portuguese to Antwerp.

From Atlantic voyages to Germanic woods, Italian palazzi to the royal castle of Prague, this was an age when people dared to experiment with the occult and dabble in utopias: to think and create new worlds.