2014-2015 Academic Catalog

Nov 22, 2024

2014-2015 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ARTH 239 - Special Topics: Renaissance and Baroque Art

Introduces specific problems in Renaissance and Baroque art and focuses on student research, oral presentation and writing skills. Qualified students from other disciplines are welcome. Spring 2009 Topic: Fashion, Power, and Identity in Renaissance and Baroque Portraiture. Portraiture ranks among the most complex and communicative of art forms. This course explores the innovations of portraiture beginning with its rebirth in the 14th century and tracing its development into the 17th century, including the emergence of self-portraiture with artists such as Alberti, Dürer, Titian, Sofonisba, and Rembrandt. We will examine portraits as displays of power, from triumphal monuments and villa frescos to images of desire, scholars’ portraits, and private keepsakes. Artists frequently struck an imaginative balance between the demands of creating a convincing likeness and embellishing it with allegorical attributes, idealized features, or the artist’s “signature style”. How were women and men represented differently? How could such gender boundaries be blurred to assert power or create new identity? Why were the images themselves believed to affect such things as women’s pregnancy, men’s battlefield prowess, or the sitter’s afterlife? Portraiture often defined fashion and beauty, but also sometimes had a darker side as an entertainment based on deformity and physical parody, as in Leonardo’s grotesques or Arcimboldo’s vegetable heads. This course offers a broad survey of portraiture in painting and sculpture, identifying common themes and raising new questions about artistic practice and symbolic content.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Spring 2011, Offered every other year