This course will survey the common and divergent patterns, important issues and events, and principal contributors (patrons, producers, and audiences) of the picturing of human warfare through history. We begin in the stone ages and continue through the era of the ancient empires, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early modern period to the twentieth century. We will investigate how different peoples at different times and under different social and environmental circumstances create bodies of images to represent war that can vary but also have similarities of form, content, function and impact. What can we learn about other cultures and about ourselves by the way we depict and interpret warfare through pictures? Evaluation will be based on written assignments and class participation. No prerequisites. No enrollment limit.

Hour: PERLMUTTER