Department of the History of Art

Are you planning to attend graduate school or want to learn more about it? Art History faculty will speak to Read More →

Conrad Rudolph “Cosmic Politics: Hugh of St Victor's The Mystic Ark and the Struggle over Elite Education in the Twelfth Read More →

2016 Work in Progress Series A Sculpture, a Blood Libel, and the Power of Portraiture in Renaissance Italy Jeanette Kohl, Read More →

On Romans, Batavians and Giants. The Quest for the True Origins of Architecture in the Dutch Republic

In thinking about the creation of ‘national literature’ and ‘national styles’ in art and architecture, most people will refer to the 19th century: the period of the rise of national states and the attempt to codify specific geographically and nationally defined identities in art, architecture and literature, based on models from a glorious past. Nevertheless, five hundred years before this era, humanist scholars, artists, monarchs and other political leaders all over Europe had already charged themselves with a comparable task. In late medieval and early modern Europe, c. 1400–1700, authority was formally based on lineage, and in all countries political ambitions and geographical claims were supported by true or false historical justifications. Literature, architecture, and paintings were also used to express these ideas of national or local history and that its earliest roots in the distant past.