ARTH 431 Leonardo da Vinci Versus Montezuma: The Renaissance-European and Native-American Encounter in the Sixteenth Century (Not offered 1999-2000)*
Five centuries ago this decade, an ever-growing number of European adventurers, chroniclers, artists, priests, and plunderers streamed into the just "discovered" American continent whose climate, flora, fauna, and human inhabitants they had never seen the likes of before. At the same time, the native inhabitants (mistakenly identified by Columbus as "Indians") realized that these white-faced intruders were imposing cultural and religious ideas that they too had never seen before. In this seminar, covering the time-span between 1492 and 1600, we will examine pictorial and textual documents of the period-Renaissance-European on the one hand, and Native Mexico and Maya on the other-first to understand the social, political, and religious ideologies in each society separately at the moment before contact, and then to understand how these apparently inimical concepts became remarkably blended ("syncretized") after contact, especially in the religious art and architecture created by native artisans at the behest of their Western Christian colonial overlords. Class format: seminar. Requirements: two or three short oral reports and a 10- to 12-page term paper expanding on one of these topics. Grades will be determined by averaging the quality of the oral reports with the quality of the written paper. Prerequisites: ArtH 101-102.