Courses in Art History
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ARTH 131.
Introduction to Art History Ancient to Medieval Group 3 1 course
This course surveys the major developments in art and architecture from the Paleolithic period through the high Middle Ages. Emphasis falls on the ancient civilizations of the Near East, Egypt, the Aegean, Greece and Rome, the early Christian world, Byzantium, Islam and the Middle Ages in Western Europe. The approach is at once historical, in that visual forms and types of images are studied in their development over time and across cultures, and anthropological, in the sense that cultures are studied at isolated moments as a way of better understanding the significant roles art and architecture play within them. Lectures are complemented by weekly reading groups that meet to discuss key problems and explore alternative theories of human cultural and artistic evolution.
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ARTH 132. Introduction to Art History Renaissance to Modern Group 3 1 course
A survey of Western art from the Renaissance to the present. This course is taught with different narrative structures in alternate semesters. One structure takes a historical overview. It tracks the changes in the place of art in society, its subject matter, patronage and audience. In alternate semesters, the class explores a limited number of art works which are treated as “case studies;” this leaves time for a deeper interrogation of specific historical and cultural issues. With each “case study” (these are organized chronologically) we look at a particular theme or “problem”—art and labor; the narrative tradition in art; the artist as cult figure; “realism” in art—and then examine how a similar problem/issue/theme is played out in a modern (late 19th-20th century work.) Past and present in this narrative are given proximity. In either narrative structure, the operating assumption of the course is that art produces and shapes meaning in the culture and does not simply “reflect” it. As we examine the notion of “meaning” in works of art, we look not only at what images mean but also at how they acquire meaning. We pay attention to the increasing awareness of art as a distinct category of human endeavor and expression and of the artist’s role in society. We focus on how visual images function in the culture; look at the conflicts inherent in the practice and reception of art; and examine the ideological investments of art history’s practitioners. Not open to students with credit in Arth 142.
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ARTH 142. Issues in Art Group 3 1 course
What is art? Why is it important? How and what do works of art mean? How does art help us both shape and make sense of our world? These are the overarching questions that the course will address as we thread our way through the examination of various genres of art--from traditional (landscape, portraiture) to contemporary (video, performance art); as we explore art in its economic, social and political dimensions (looking, for example, at public art and identity politics or at controversial art and the First Amendment); and as we examine the role art can play in our public and private consciousness. We will be mindful throughout of how the production of meaning in art involves a complex collaboration of artist, viewers and artwork. In this discussion-based course, we will be active viewers and analytical thinkers--reading, writing and looking, in a critical way, at images in slides, at actual works of art, and at films and videos.
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ARTH 197H. First-Year Seminar 1 course
A seminar focused on a theme related to the study of art history. Open only to first-year students.
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ARTH 201. Baroque Art: The Age of the Marvelous Group 3 1 course
The course introduces the major painters and sculptors (Rembrandt, Rubens, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Bernini, Artemisia Gentileschi, Velazques and others) of 17th-century Europe by exploring a few major themes. Using, as an overarching concept, the Baroque as the "age of the Marvelous" allows us to view intersections among the worlds of art, science, theater, printing, mechanical engineering, religion and the occult. The course examines the visual arts in relation to various contexts--economic, historic and domestic--as well as institutions--the Church, the monarchy, and academies of art. It investigates the development of certain subjects that emerged as indepenedent genres in the 17th century: still life, landscape and genre painting. The course also looks at how artists perceived themselves and were perceived (some would say "constructed") both by their contemporaries and by susequent writers up to the present day. We concern ourselves throughout with the complex process of interpretation--looking not only at what works of art mean, but how they mean.
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ARTH 212. Image, Cult, Devotion:Medieval Devotional Art and Its Audiences Group 4 1 course
This course examines the stunning variety of images (paintings, sculptures, prints) that served as catalysts to religious devotion for medieval and Renaissance Christians. Beginning with the first image cults in the sixth century, and concluding with the Reformation's renewed call to restrict, censor or liquidate images in the 16th, it attempts to trace the history of attitudes toward such "devotional" imagery inside both the "high" intellectual culture and the "low" popular culture of these periods. Why did cults form around certain types of pictures, and why were they considered illegitimate by authorities? How did images such as the tormented "Man of Sorrows," or the lamenting Virgin of the Pieta, which had no basis in the Gospels, become so popular and so important to the progress of lay spirituality? How did miraculous images of the saints--images that answered prayers, comforted the sinner or healed the sick with effusions of tears, blood or milk--become invested with such powers? What are the cultural-political implications for the image-controversies of today? Drawing on psychology, anthropology, social history and linguistics, we will see how the makers of devotional art create and shape certain kinds of viewing practices and how, in social terms, new audiences for the new genres are created.
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ARTH 218. Cathedral and Court: Gothic Art Group 4 1 course
This course examines selected aspects of architectural and artistic production during the high and late Middle Ages in western Europe. Most of the course centers on the revolutionary developments in architecture of the 12th century - the great Gothic cathedrals, with their rich sculpture and breathtaking stained glass windows. Church building is studied in the multiple contexts of medieval metaphysics, political consolidation and court patronage in France, the emergent urban economy and the class conflicts that accompanied it. Illustrated manuscripts are studied as mediums of pictorial innovation and objects of exquisite beauty, as well as sites of struggle between the Biblical truths at their center, and the obscene humor and parody at their margins. Selected aspects of the decorative arts are also studied. Lectures and group discussions.
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ARTH 232. Islamic Art and Architecture Group 3 1 course
This course is an introduction to Muslim visual culture from its Arabian origins, through the medieval period of its asendance and international dominance, to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the Mughal dynasty's rule in India. Through slide-based lectures and group discussions, students encounter the astonishing beauty of monuments such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Great Mosque of Cordoba, Alhambra Palace in Granada, Taj Mahal in Agra and many others. An introductory section surveys the historical and geographical parameters of Islamic civilization, its religious worldview, forms of authority and social organization. Other historical issues include the cultural politics of conquest, appropriation of Jewish and Christian holy sites, impact of the Crusades and Reconquista in Spain, and the transmission of Greek science and philosophy to Western Europe through Arabic learning. Students take different approaches to a diversity of architectural monuments and examine their decoration in a variety of media (painting, mosaic, stucco, ceramic tile). The luxury arts--breathtaking carvings in ivory or gold, lavishly illustrated manuscripts--are also studied in their cultural context. A final section examines Islamic attitudes towards the arts, the prohibition of figurative imagery, the preeminence of calligraphy and textiles, and the dazzling complexity of geometrical designs. Throughout the course students are made aware of the process of creative assimilation from pre-Islamic or non-Muslim traditions, a process by which Islam gradually took on its own distinct visual identity and generated its own cultural ambiance.
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ARTH 235. Women and Medieval Art Group 4 1 course
What was the role of images in women's experience in the Middle Ages? This course seeks to answer that question through an examination of images made of, for and by women in this dynamic period of history. The course is framed by the legalization of Christianity (in 313) and Luther's declaration of Protestantism (in 1517), thereby focusing on the entire medieval tradition and its exploration of gender and image. Issues and characters surrounding the representation of women include the fundamental figures of Eve and Mary, the varying roles of female saints, and the figuration of women in medical manuscripts. The patronage of women in art shaped several long-lasting traditions, including courtly love and its accompanying allegorical imageries of chess, gardens and castles; it also invites investigation into the artistic creativity of women, and the role of women patrons in historical manuscripts and their concurrent political claims. The course considers the use and manipulation of images by women such as nuns and their visions of Christ, and aristocratic women and their personalized books of hours (medieval prayer books). A variety of media present the issues of the course: panel painting, manuscript illumination, sculpture, stained glass, tapestry and ivory. The course seeks to understand the construction and subversion of gender roles through images. Reading of medieval sources in translation; discussion-based class. This course is cross-listed with Women's Studies.
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ARTH 290H. Topics in The History of Art 1 course
An in-depth study of a particular topic in the history of art. It may be an examination of a specific artist, group or movement or an exploration of a particular theme or issue in art.
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ARTH 295. Art, Experience, Criticism: From Modernism to Postmodernism Group 3 1 course
This seminar-style course provides the student with a rigorous introduction to the history and theory of art criticism as a discourse about art, as well as an opportunity to cultivate the skills of the critic him- or herself. Weekly readings and discussions explore a wide range of topics, such as the birth of aesthetics, modernity and modernism, abstract art and avant-gardism, kitsch, pop art, Minimalism and varieties of postmodernism. Special topics, such as art and obscenity, public art, the museum, art and radical politics, feminism, gay and lesbian culture, and art and racism are democratically selected by the class in the final weeks of the course. Open to all students.
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ARTH 302. Italian Renaissance Art Group 4 1 course
The course explores developments in the visual arts (primarily painting and sculpture) in 15th- and 16th-century Italy. It includes such artists as Masaccio, Donatello, Sofonisba Anguissola, Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo. The course is partly a chronological survey and partly a thematic exploration of important issues--the social construction of the artist; the problematic notion of "secularism" as it applies to Renaissance art; the concept of humanism and its effect on creative developments; the problems of Renaissance historiography; the question of whether or not women had a Renaissance. The class is also concerned with the presuppositions on which art historians have based their interpretations of Renaissance art and culture and on the methods that they have applied to support these presuppositions. A portion of the readings are from contemporary sources - the writings of Vasari, Alberti, Ghiberti, Michelangelo and Castiglione to name a few. Class sessions will be mostly discussion.
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ARTH 310. Northern Renaissance Art Group 3 1 course
This course examines the major painters working in the Low Countries (present-day Belguim, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) during the dynamic era stretching from the mid-14th to the mid-16tth century, the period known as the "Renaissance of the North." An initial survey covers the great Flemish "primitives" Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden; then their brilliant line of followers, Hans Memling, Hugo van der Goes, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel, are studied. Through group discussions, collaborative visual analyses and illustrated lectures, students become engaged not only with the unique visual character of these marvelous works of art, but also with their cultic, devotional, social and political uses, the constellation of meanings they embodied for their makers, their patrons and their beholders. Special topics include: the development of a northern European realist tradition, changing forms of patronage and aesthetic production, rising social status of the artist, changing character of piety and religious experience, creation of new devotional genres, impact of humanism and Reformation and evolution of secular imagery.
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ARTH 330. Van Gogh, Gauguin and Post-Impressionism Group 4 1 course
This course considers how art historians have conceptualized "Post Impressionism" and explores the institutions (Academy, Salon, Ecole des Beaux Arts) and market structure (dealers, auction houses, the apparatus of art criticism) that influenced or controlled how, for whom, and under what conditions art in 19th century France was produced and how, where and by whom art was consumed (that is, used, purchased or viewed). Other issues considered are the social and financial consequences of the artists' independence from traditional institutions in 19th-century France and how women artists did or did not fit into these institutional and market structures. The "Post Impressionist" artists studied will be used as springboards to discuss some larger themes about art, artists, critics and audiences in a particular historical moment. Some of these artists were involved in the social movements of their time and can, therefore, be discussed against a background of modern urbanization and the philosophical, cultural, scientific and social theories of some of their contemporaries. Readings include primary sources--artists' letters, journals and other writings as well as excerpts from contemporary works and art criticism from specialized and mainstream journals of the late 19th-century.
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ARTH 332. Sin, Fear and Death in European Art,1050-1550 Group 4 1 course
This course explores a range of visual genres which, for medieval and early modern Europeans, thematized ideas about sin and vice, guilt and penance, contempts for the world, death, burial and decay, the horror of Hell, the quest for purgation and the hope of resurrection at the end of time. Illustrated manuscripts of the Apocalypse; panoramic Last Judgment scenes from church portals; gruesome depictions of saints' deaths; miraculous images of Christ as the tortured Man of Sorrows; the sculpture of the so-called transi tombs (which showed the deceased as a worm-eaten skeleton); visions of Hell and its torments; and the "Dance of Death" of the early Renaissance, are all studies in the cultural context of Christian theology, popular religion and devotions, the monastic literature of the macabre, the catastrophes of the Black Death era, radical millenarianism and the repression of groups deemed deviant (heretics, homosexuals, Jews, witches) through to the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath. Did the Middle Ages bequeath to us, as one historian claims, a distinctly Western "guilt culture," and if so, how has the iconography of sin and death persisted in Western art up to the present day?
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ARTH342. Art Theory and Criticism Group 3 1 course
Learning to read contemporary criticism involves identifying the issues and assumptions at stake in such writing but are often expressed indirectly or not at all. Art criticism seeks to put into language something which is inherently non-verbal, which does not unfold in an orderly, linear way (as writing must) and which leaves meaning open and unfixed. Thus, learning to read the literary genre of art criticism is a challenging goal. In this course we try to accomplish several closely interrelated things: we discuss the idea of art theory ("aesthetics") and some art-theoretical texts which have been foundational for Modernist and contemporary art; we discuss art criticism as a very particular kind of creative writing; we look at some central examples of this genre, texts which distinguish themselves by having a theory of art underpinning them; we read and discuss contemporary art criticism; and we write some art criticism of our own.
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ARTH 345. History of Self-Portraiture Group 3 1 course
The self-portrait has a long and varied history: part manifesto, part self-expression, part philosophical investigation, the self-portrait invites questions of creativity and identity. How does an artist construct a self-portrait to represent both the self and the artistic project? The answers to this question provoke an examination of the changing uses and transformations of the genre. The course begins with the early explorations of self-portraiture in the Middle Ages and continues through to the emergence of the self-portrait in the Northern and Italian Renaissances, its full expression in the Baroque period, its politicization in the Neo-Classicism of the 18th century, its controversies in the 19th century, and its powerful and increasingly pervasive presence in the 20th century. The artists studied include van Eyck, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentilleschi, Rembrandt, David, Courbet, Munch, van Gogh, Malevich, Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, and Cindy Sherman among others. At stake is the process through which an artist presents his or her artistic mission through the self-portrait. What are Botticelli's motivations for including his self-portrait in a painting representing members of the powerful Medici family as the Three Magi? With what messages does van Gogh send Gauguin a self-portrait as a Japanese monk? How does Frida Kahlo construct a radical political identity for herself through her self-portraits? The course incorporates both original sources written by the artists themselves and scholarly sources contextualizing the artists and their self-portraits. Discussion-based course.
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ARTH 390H. Advanced Topics in the History of Art Group 6 1/2-1 course
An independent directed study centered on a specific topic arranged with the instructor.
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ARTH 494. Art History Projects 1 course
Advanced work in art history. Prerequisite: senior classification and a major in art history.
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