Graduate Art History& Architectural History Course Offerings, Spring 2013

* Please check SIS to confirm the following information. Updates can occur at any time and the information here is to be used as a guideline.

ARAH 9510

Lay Piety in the Middle Ages
T 10:00 - 12:30
Fayerweather Hall 208
L. Reilly

This course will examine the changing dynamic of lay piety in later medieval England through the material culture and architecture of the parish church. We will look at the effect of movements like Lollardy on parish life as we explore lay people’s experience of religion in the pre-Reformation period.

ARAH 9525

Italian Renaissance Masterpieces in Context
R 10:00 - 12:30
Fayerweather Hall 208
P. Barolsky

We will ponder the fields of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art history as they have evolved in the modern history of art history. We will eclectically explore aspects of method, art criticism, theory, social, political, and economic context, style, iconography, biography, bibliography and the question of how to write effectively about art. Our primary sources will be Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Comedy, and Vasari's Lives. We will seek to understand the role of Ovid in Renaissance and Baroque art and in the theory of art. We will attempt to understand why Dante is central to our understanding of the Renaissance. We will emphasize the different ways in which Vasari's great book can be read. We will reflect broadly on the relations of Renaissance and Baroque art to the broad history of art to which they belong. Think of this seminar as a miniature course in art theory and methods that focuses on specific works from a particular period, circa 1300 to 1700; in other words, early modern European art history and theory. We will dwell on the differences between seeing art history as the account of how works of art came to be the way they are and the account of works of art as we see them without the construction of a deep context. We will ponder the question whether we need art history and the question of whether it can be replaced by something better.
Works to be explored include the following: Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel decorations, Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel, Botticelli's Primavera, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel decoration, Raphael's Stanza d'Eliodoro, Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, Correggio's Jupiter and Io, Titian's Bacchanal of the Andrians, Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, and related works by Poussin, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velazquez.

ARAH 9540

Transnational Modernisms
F 10:00 - 12:30
Fayerweather Hall 208
S. Crane

This seminar considers movements of designers and transfers of architectural knowledge across national boundaries in the modern period. We will consider the methodological and theoretical frameworks that architectural and urban historians have used to investigate interactions between local clients and foreign designers, while paying close attention to the cultural and political dynamics of these encounters in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

ARAH 9565

Light
M 10:00 - 12:30
Fayerweather Hall 208
J. Summers

Light is a fundamental condition of vision, but also of the representation of the visible. Gombrich argued that depicted light is an issue only in Western painting, from Antiquity to Impressionism. We will test that hypothesis. Reading: Gombrich, Heritage of Apelles; Summers, Real Spaces; Vision, Reflection and Desire, Belting, Florence and Baghdad, and others.

ARAH 9585

Early Indian Sculpture and Architecture
W 10:00 - 12:30
Fayerweather Hall 208
D. Ehnbom

The principal purpose of the seminar is to examine the development of Indian sculpture and architecture from their beginnings to the 3rd/4th century A.D., paying particular attention to the formation of a visual and symbolic vocabulary common to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.