Coursework
Because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field, classes often welcome students from other departments, such as English, Music, Divinity, Social Thought. Early modern art history students also frequently take classes in ancient, medieval, Islamic, African, Latin American, and modern art, and in other departments, including History, Music, English, and Romance Languages.
Recently Offered Courses
Early Modern Geographies of Art
This seminar studies the early development of modern concepts of land as nature and/or territory (nation, empire), understood in relation to techniques - overtly "artistic" ones like landscape painting, but also cartography, surveying, and geometry (geo-metry, the measuring of the earth). Along the way, the seminar addresses related recent work in art history that attempts to situate the discipline in a global geographical context. Readings address both European and non-European topics and may include recent work by Edward Casey, Lorraine Daston, James Elkins, Claire Farago, Pierre Hadot, David Harvey, Thomas daCosta Kaufmann, Sabine MacCormack, Chandra Mukerji, Rose Marie San Juan, David Summers, and Bronwen Wilson. Some prior acquaintance with theories of space/place and biopolitics (de Certeau, Foucault) will be useful but is not required. While readings will focus largely on early modern topics (1400-1800), seminar papers may address topics in any period, including recent art based in cartographic and "locative" media. Zorach
The Virgin Mary: Agent & Object
A favored subject of medieval artists and patrons, the Virgin Mary was also a miraculous agent in European medieval culture. In the Middle Ages representations of Mary appeared in all media, from monumental sculpture, to small-scale metalwork. The Virgin was also understood to appear to visionaries, royalty, peasants and artists. This course examines the changing face, and role, of the Virgin Mary in the art of the Middle Ages. We will investigate how Mary was transformed as a representation over the course of the Middle Ages, we will ask why these transformations may have taken place, and we will consider the influence exerted by representations of Mary within western medieval culture. Kumler
Colloquium: The Body In Renaissance Art
This discussion course will address the visual arts (painting, drawing, prints and sculpture) of renaissance Europe as a site for meditation on the uneasy relationship between the bodies and souls of both artists and viewers. We will focus our discussion on primary texts and images, supplemented by the work of art historians and contemporary theorists. Topics include Renaissance psychology and art criticism; Neoplatonic and Aristotelian theories of the soul, vision and desire; style and "imagination"; portraiture; the passions; witchcraft and demonology; humoral psychology, particularly in relation to theories of melancholy; allegory and idolatry; anatomy and physiology; and the role of prints and drawings in expressing intention. Artists considered in detail will include Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rosso Fiorentino, Durer, and Titian, among others. Students may choose to write a research paper or a series of shorter written and oral assignments.Zorach
The Politics of Luxury in the Middle Ages
Traditional arthistorical distinctions between "high" and "low" art have often privileged the monumental arts of the Middle Ages. This course challenges such valuations through a re-examination of the artful object in the medieval Europe. Focusing on the sumptuary arts (metalwork, joyaux, small-scale sculpture, textiles and manuscripts), we will explore how medieval patrons and artists defined luxury, pursued status through objects, and participated in a complex and politically-charged gift-culture. Emphasis will be placed on understanding how patronage influenced the form and meaning of medieval objects, and how images, objects and monuments spoke to, and about their patrons. Relationships between ecclesiastical and secular power, and between the clergy and the laity (more broadly construed), will be explored as they are implicated in patronage of the arts and in gifting. Changes in the status of the artist/artisan will also be examined in light of changing conceptions of the value of art- and object-making. Kumler
Venetian Mannerism
This course will cover the central post Giorgionesque years of the "golden age" of Venetian painting, including the mature career of Titian and the early years of Tintoretto and Veronese. The central theoretical thrust will be to understand the uniqueness of Venetian art within the context of the Italian Renaissance by examining Venetian art and culture at a moment when it comes into dramatic contact with the art of central Italy. Attention will be given to the nature and mechanisms of this interaction, especially after the sack of Rome, and responses to it such as Titian's so-called crisis and the meaning of Mannerism in Venice. In addition to painting, we will examine drawing, sculpture, theory (especially the disegno-colorito controversy) and their quite particular venezianità.Cohen
The Medieval Apocalypse: Visions and Images
Both terrifying and longed-for, the end of the world was not an abstract concept in the Middle Ages. This course examines how visionaries and artists grappled with the representation of the Apocalypse as described in the biblical account of John's Revelation. We will explore how this cataclysmic event was represented and interpreted in manuscript painting, sculpture, metalwork and textiles from the ninth to the late fourteenth centuries. Medieval understandings of when the Apocalypse would happen, of what it might mean for living people, and of how it should be understood as a text changed over time: through the art of the middle ages we will examine how visual representations of the Apocalypse responded to these changes, and what role they played in preparing viewers for the end of time. Kumler
North Italian Painters: Lotto and Pordenone
This course will explore the phenomenon of provincialism in north Italy in its political, social and cultural context by focusing on two major personalities, Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone and Lorenzo Lotto, although many other artists and schools will be introduced. These north Italian milieu are particularly fascinating in the first half of the sixteenth century when local schools of painting provide a substantial counterweight to Venice and are the source of considerable artistic innovation. The course will attempt to define the issues that emerge from the interaction of a central metropolitan artistic culture and local provincial ones, which have their own well-developed artistic traditions. For example, we will attempt to discover distinctly provincial modes of patronage, picture-type, iconography and style against the background of this play of local traditions and the pull of Venice. In the process we will try to understand certain art-historical phenomena that transcend the individual cases of Pordenone and Lotto and are generalizable to this artistic environment. Some examples include: 1) Peripatetic provincial artists such as Pordenone and Lotto made earlier and more consequential trips to central Italy than their Venetian contemporaries, and their art becomes a real middle ground between Rome and Venice (and between disegno and colore). 2) Artist such as Pordenone and Lotto produce some of the most personally expressive religious pictures of the era and seem to have been particularly affected by the pre-Tridentine Reform movement. 3) Lotto and a whole cast of other north Italian artists produced works of nervous intensity and private emotionalism in the second decade of the century, i.e. at the same time or earlier than the first generation of Mannerists in Florence. 4) Pordenone and other north Italian painters (e.g. Correggio) move in a direction still in the first third of the century that has been described as proto-baroque and seem to have had a substantial impact on the first generation of baroque artists in Lombardy and Emilia. Students will be invited to employ a wide range of art historical methodology in exploring these and other issues not only in the art of Pordenone and Lotto, but also in other north Italian painters of the period.Cohen
The Paris Book Trade: 1280-1380
This course considers the growth of the commercial book trade in late medieval Paris. Working from the evidence of the manuscripts themselves and archival documentation we will explore Parisian manuscript production in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through a consideration of individual illuminators, teams of illuminators, and their works. Emphasis will be placed on a reconsideration of the validity of notions of "workshop" or artistic "hand" in light of new research on the organization of the Parisian book trade, and its practices, in the period. Consideration will be given to the role of the University and the private market in the production of illuminated manuscripts and the significance of the emergence of a professional class of lay illuminators. The course will also examine how illuminators developed novel visual programs for new vernacular and Latin texts. Kumler
Giorgione: Connoisseurship and Meaning
In an attempt to understand the origin and early phases of the High Renaissance in Venice, this course will concentrate on the central, very problematic figure of Giorgione, but its scope will include the first three decades of the sixteenth century and such artists as the late Bellini, Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma Vecchio and others. Since the definition of Giorgione's oeuvre is perhaps the most important unresolved issue of renaissance connoisseurship, a considerable amount of class time will be devoted to the practice of connoisseurship and the discussion of its possibilities, limitations and theoretical assumptions. The second major theme of the course is Giogione's "new" attitudes towards subject matter and his innovations in pictorial types (e.g. landscape, meaning in portraiture), which seem to have led to some of the most discussed iconographical puzzles in Western art (e.g. Tempest, Three Philosophers, Fete Champetre). Students will have the option of doing seminar reports that focus on any of a wide range of methods and approaches including connoisseurship, style, history of pictorial types, emblematic iconography, social and intellectual history, history of taste and collecting, or whatever else they can credibly propose. Cohen
Typology in Medieval Art
Typology is the Christian interpretation of Jewish scripture as a prefiguration of events in the life of Christ. In practice, however, medieval notions of typological prefiguration expanded the principle to embrace not simply the New Testament, but all of Christian history. As medieval Christians struggled to adapt and appropriate Jewish scripture to their practice and belief, the visual arts and architecture became important resources for the articulation of typological argument. This course investigates the place of typological visual programs in the art of the medieval west. We will explore the means employed by visual typology to reframe events and prophecies from the Old Testament, the impact of visual typology on medieval notions of time, and how visual typology was exploited for political ends. The course will be focused principally on art and architecture of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; consideration will, however, be given to early medieval antecedents for this work. Kumler
Renaissance Neoplatonism and The Visual Arts
Renaissance humanists' interest in Plato and in the Christian tradition of neoplatonism had a strong impact on theories of the visual arts in the early modern period. Renaissance art historians in the mid-twentieth century felt a particular sympathy with Italian humanism in general and neoplatonism in particular, and this sympathy has deeply shaped our understanding of Renaissance art. In this course we will read (in translation) selected texts of Plato, late antique Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, and works by Renaissance humanists (particularly Marsilio Ficino), along with art historians, especially those of the Warburg school, who devoted particular attention to Renaissance neoplatonism. Topics to be addressed include theories of creativity and representation; the uses of magic and astrology and the risks of eccentric religious beliefs; European thinkers' attitudes toward the cultural and intellectual traditions of the eastern Mediterranean; text-image relations; the body and sexuality; architecture, gardens and grottoes.Zorach
Medieval Word and Medieval Image
The relationship between word and image has emerged as a central concern for medieval art history and medieval studies. Attending to this development in the historiography of the Middle Ages, we will explore how medieval theologians, philosophers, mystics, artists—and images—framed and engaged the relationship between the textual and the visual. Our conceptual framework will embrace writings on word and image by authors both medieval and modern, including: Augustine of Hippo, Gregory the Great, Hugh of Saint-Victor, William Durandus, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Erwin Panofsky, Emile Mâle, Friedrich Ohly, Otto Pächt, Meyer Schapiro, Herbert Kessler, Hans Belting, Suzanne Lewis, Michael Camille and Jeffrey Hamburger. We will pursue an interrelated series of questions. What does it mean to "read" an image? What place does the centrality of "the Word" in medieval Christian culture leave for images? Is a notion of visual (as opposed to textual) literacy an operative category in the Middle Ages? Is the ontology of the text always prior when we examine medieval images? What is the place of iconography in a twenty-first century medieval art history? The aim of the course is to grapple with these questions rather than to attempt definitive answers. The seminar will emphasize close readings and engaged discussions of selected works of art. Kumler
Anachronism
The Renaissance is posited as a break in time that is both novelty and repetition, one that engendered a fundamental change in Western notions of space and time. The remarkable tenacity of Renaissance aesthetic values leads some to believe in their universal relevance, but this relevance has been bolstered, if not generated, over time through repeated material, institutional, even political efforts. This seminar approaches the Renaissance and/as anachronism from several points of view: revivalism, classicism and antiquarianism; material practices of copying; theories of history; modern appropriations of the Renaissance (perhaps to include paranoid historical fictions like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code); and contemporary theory. The seminar will include an engagement with work by Aby Warburg and the Warburg school on Renaissance classicism, an examination of the temporalities associated with both Renaissance and modern psychoanalytic theories of melancholia ("the time is out of joint," as famous melancholic Hamlet said), and visits to Special Collections in Regenstein Library to study printed images that served to disseminate Renaissance classicism. It will also consider postmodern theorists' and contemporary artists' "anachronistic" approaches to Renaissance and Baroque art and aesthetics.Zorach