Rome: Art in the Service of Power
This course and city experience form part of The Story of Art and the Cities that Helped Write It, an ambitious long-form programme exploring art history through the places where it was created, collected, transformed, and preserved. Through a combination of expert-led online learning and immersive city experiences, the programme places great works of art back into their original cultural context—revealing the people, power, ideas, and institutions that shaped them. Each individual course and city experience can be enjoyed on its own, while also contributing to a wider journey across the cities that defined the story of art.
Find our more about The Story of Art and the Cities that Helped Write It programme here
Overview
The museums, palaces, and archaeological sites of Rome are fundamental to the story of art because they preserve the legacy of antiquity and the civilisation that transformed visual culture across the ancient world. In Rome, sculpture, architecture, urban planning, and public monument became instruments of power, memory, and imperial identity. Temples, forums, triumphal arches, baths, villas, and portraits were designed not only for beauty, but to communicate authority and shape how an empire understood itself. The survival and rediscovery of these antiquities profoundly influenced later generations, inspiring artists, architects, and collectors from the Renaissance onward. Today, collections such as those in the Capitoline Museums, the Vatican Museums, and sites including the Roman Forum, Colosseum, and Pantheon reveal how the material culture of Rome became a foundation of the Western artistic tradition. To study Rome is to encounter the enduring power of antiquity and to understand how the ancient world continued to shape the art of later centuries.
Rome (Treasures From Antiquity)
Dates:
Online Course: 28 Oct, 4, 11 Nov 2026 Wednesdays, 4pm GMT
City Tour: 20 & 21 Nov 2026 Friday & Saturday, 9:30am-5pm
Online course (per city module) €380 - 3×1-hour lectures preparing each city (collectors, context, art history framework)
Rome experience only (2 days) €1950 - Lecturer-led immersive museum + collection-focused city experience
Online + Rome experience (combined package) €2,320 Full pre-study + guided on-site immersion.
Lecturer’s Biography
Aliki Braine
Aliki Braine (b. 1976, Paris) is an artist and art historian. She studied at The Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford, The Slade School and The Courtauld Institute, London where she was awarded a distinction for her theses on 17th century painting. She has been working for The National Gallery for 25 years and teaches for Christie’s Education, The Wallace Collection, The Arts Society and numerous private clients. Aliki is also a practicing artist who taught at Camberwell College of Art and Westminster University and who regularly exhibits her work internationally.
Publications & Exhibitions
Books
Art; The Whole Story, Thames and Hudson (2010)
501 Artists, Barons Publishing (2007)
1001 Paintings to See Before You Die, New Burlington Books (2006)
Reviews
Robert Shore, Beg, Steal and Borrow; Artists Against Originality, Elephant Books (2017)
Pauline Martin, L’Évidence, le vide, la vie; La photographie face à ses lacunes, Ithaque Editions (2017)
Brady Wilks, Alternative Photographic Processes: Crafting Handmade Images, Focal Press (2015)
Robert Shore, Post-Photography: The Artist With a Camera, Laurence King Pub (2014)
Exhibitions
‘Veronica Bailey & Aliki Braine: Cross-Reference', dalla Rosa Gallery, London (2018)
‘Wilful Damage’, Galerie Raum Mit Licht, Vienna, Austria (2011)
‘Les Evidences du Réel; La photographie face à ses lacunes’, Musée d'art de Pully, Lausanne, Switzerland (2017)
‘Material Light’, Kulturni Centar, Belgrade, Serbia (2015)
