The Artistic Immersion of a Lifetime in a Land of Origins

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The JSS IN CIVITA Master Class Residency & Guided Residency in Italy is now accepting applications for Fall 2024. Our community, program and studio facilities provide a nurturing incubator-like artistic environment located in legendary Civita Castellana, less than an hour north of Rome – A singular artistic journey in the most pictorially evocative landscape in Italy, in the birthplace of open air painting ™.

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Guest Artist

2024 Master Class Residency Guest of Honor – Yedidya Hershberg

Director’s Statement

Civita Castellana and its environs is a place of intoxicating natural beauty. It is steeped in history, both ancient and artistic, going back millennia to the pre-Roman Faliscan civilization. In the Lazio region of Italy, during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries Civita was a Grand Tour epicenter of open air landscape painting for artists sojourning through the Roman Campagna. It has been painted and inhabited by such artistic eminences as Corot, Ingres, Turner, Granet, Michallon, Valenciennes, Dughet, Bertin and played host to the likes of Mozart, Byron, Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others too numerous to list. This is the landscape that set on fire Nicholas Poussin’s and Claude Lorrain’s Arcadian imaginations as they traversed northward from Rome toward Monte Soratte through the Campagna on horseback and on foot, drawing and dreaming. In this landscape, Arcadia as idea found its embodiment. Among the impressive tufa cliffs, gorges, ruins, castles, forts and pastures, all majestically administered by the fabled Monte Soratte, is the immersive and engaging locus that is the JSS in Civita Master Class & Guided Residency – a peerless painter’s paradise ™.

— Israel Hershberg, Director & Founder

The School

JSS in Civita, Italy, offers students and artists the possibility of an incomparable engagement with the history of art, its idioms, pictorial conceptions, methods, materials and techniques. The direct experience of Italy’s boundless artistic heritage has the ability to nurture artistic understanding, skill and life-long inspiration.

Screen Shot 2018-02-27 at 7.11.22 PM.png Corot, Civita Castellana, 1826

In 2024 we will be offering the following programs:

Master Class Residency

with

Israel Hershberg & Guest of Honor Yedidya Hershberg

Guided Residency

Our individual studio facilities and studio classroom, located conveniently in and around Civita’s historic center, are available to students who wish to work indoors or couple their open-air work with studio time. The studio classroom will be available to Guided Residency participants who require an indoor situation.