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FALL 2018
Among the most fascinating and mysterious works of art of Western culture are those from the very beginnings of human civilization and the great cultures of ancient Egypt, the Middle East, Greece, and Rome. In a survey extending from the earliest painting, sculpture, and architecture of the prehistoric period to that of the final dissolution of Roman imperial power in the East in the fifteenth century (the Byzantine Empire), this class takes up the artistic, religious, social, and political factors that shaped the art of those great cultures.
CRN#: 10008
Meetings: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 11:10AM – 12:00PM
Place: WAT 1000
The period from the artistic emergence of Early Christianity in the third century to the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the fifth is one of the most dramatic of Western European history. In taking up the religious, liturgical, social, and political factors in the shaping of medieval art, this course moves from the initial Christian resistance to art, to its gradual acceptance by a fledgling Christianity, to its adoption by a Church almost synonymous over-night with imperial authority–but a hollow authority, an authority which in the struggle between Christian, pagan, and barbarian demands would culminate in its own implosion and the almost complete destruction of Western civilization.
CRN#: 25626
Meetings: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 12:10PM – 1:00PM
Place: ARTS 335
FALL 2018 GRADUATE LEVEL
‘Methods of art history, just like pictures, can be dated. This is by no means a depreciation of pictures or methods — just banal historical fact.’ (F. Antal)
This seminar examines the historical foundations of art history through readings of its formative texts. The idea is to jump right in to the key debates that have defined our understanding of artworks and visual expression in the Western Tradition from antiquity onward. The course will begin by dissecting core writings on art, aesthetics and meaning by early philosophers and historians. We will then consider how these ideas enabled the codification of art history as a humanistic discipline during the nineteenth century and fueled its further refinement in the early twentieth. Rather than conceptualizing art history as a series of separate and distinct approaches, we will instead trace a few durable concerns have shaped its practice. Centrally, the seminar will interrogate an essential complementarity in art history: that artworks exist simultaneously as objects of living encounter and artifacts of historical meaning. Our purpose lies in examining how foundational thinkers balanced a desire to conceptualize the aesthetics of art (in the ancient Greek sense of “relating to perception by the senses”) with the need to place such expressive efforts in relationship to history.
CRN#: 10044
Meetings: Wednesday 1:10PM – 4:00PM
Place: ARTS 333