ARTH 110(S) Reading the Renaissance: Interpreting Italian Renaissance Art and History
Many works of Renaissance art, such as Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, and Michelangelo's David, are remarkably familiar to us. But even as they live in our cultural consciousness, we may perceive them as elevated and remote masterpieces of western culture, housed away in museums halfway around the world. Just what is it that makes these objects so admired and important? And what might we all have to gain, intellectually, by considering them? We will focus in depth on a series of individual works of art, learning and honing skills of observation, visual and contextual analysis, and written and oral expression. But we will also step back from the objects to explore and balance different approaches and points of view and to consider, more broadly, different issues that can factor into the very act of interpretation. The goal of the course is that students emerge from it with a rich understanding of the selected works in question, as well as a mindfulness of the ways in which the Renaissance period might inform our aesthetic perceptions and our critical understanding of the construction of the past.
Format: seminar. Evaluation will be based on several short writing assignments as well as group projects, presentations, and debates.
No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 16 (expected: 16). Preference to freshmen, then sophomores.
Satisfies the pre-1800 requirement. This course does NOT satisfy the seminar requirement for the major.
Hour: SOLUM