Details of further reading suggestions as well as a relevant bibliography for the course will be provided at the start of the semester.
Core bibliographic works for the course include:
Arnold, D. (2004) Art History. A Very Short Introduction. OUP
Pooke, Grant, and Diana Newall (2008) Art History: the basics. Routledge.
Preziosi, D. (ed.) (2009) The Art of Art History. A Critical Anthology. OUP [eBook]
Alcock, S:E. and Osborne, R: (eds) (2012) Classical Archaeology. A Second Edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
Borg, B. (2015) (ed.) A Companion to Roman Art. Wiley-Blackwell.
Dyson, S.L. (2006) In pursuit of ancient pasts a history of classical archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. YUP
Friedland, E.A., Sobocinski, M.G. and Gazda, E.K. (eds) (2015) The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture. OUP
Marconi, C. (ed.) (2015) Oxford handbook of Greek and Roman Art and Architecture. OUP.
Marlowe, E. (2013) Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art. Bloomsbury.
Marvin, M. (2008) The Language of the Muses. The Dialogue between Roman and Greek Sculpture. The J. Paul Getty Museum.
Smith, R.R.R. (2002) The use of images: visual history and ancient history. In T.P. Wiseman (ed.), Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome: 59-102. OUP.
Stewart, P. (2008) The Social History of Roman Art. CUP
Blair, S. and Bloom, J. (2003) The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field. AB 85/1: 152-184
Cahn, W. (1969) The artist as outlaw and Apparatchik: Freedom and Constraint in the Interpretation of Medieval Art. In Sker, S. (ed.), The Twelfth Century Renaissance (Exhibition Catalogue of the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design)
Cassidy, B. ed. (1990) Iconography at the Crossroads: papers from the colloquium sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23-24 March 1990. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Index of Christian Art (Occasional Papers 2)
Freeman Sandler, L. and Kessler H. (1989) An Exchange on the ‘State of Medieval Art History’. Art Bulletin 71/3: 506-507
Hoffman, E. ed. (2007) Late Antique and Medieval Art of the Mediterranean World.
Kessler, H. (1988) On the State of Medieval Art History. AB 70/2, 166-87
Rudolph, C. ed. (2006) A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe. Blackwell
Wharton, A. J. (1995) Refiguring the Post Classical City. Dura Europas, Jerash, Jerusalem and Ravenna
COURSE SCHEDULE
Please note - the schedule includes two make-up day: Friday September 21 and Friday November 9
INTRODUCTION
1. Tues. Sept. 4 - Introduction to the course
Course organization, requirements, logistics, etc.
2. Thurs. Sept. 6 -
Introduction to Art Historical Thinking
Example of an approach that has influenced how we think about art history: Giorgio Vasari
Essential reading: Preziosi 2009: 22-26 (Vasari)
PART 1: HISTORIOGRAPHIC APPROACHES IN ART HISTORY
Ancient art: the development of the field (Prof. Hansen)
3. Tues. Sept. 11 Art and History – systems and classical archaeology (object)
16th-18th-century interests in and approaches to ancient art. Winckelmann; systematic study; art, culture and historicity; Grand Tour and collecting; Kant, aesthetics and sensory knowledge
Essential reading Bartman 2015: 15-22 [3-10 online] (collecting); Dyson 2006: 1-19 (protohistory of classical archaeology); Hall 2014: 1-7 (history of study of classical archaeology); Marvin 2008: 103-19 (Winckelmann); Preziosi 2009: 13-21 (Winckelmann); Whitley 2001: 23-29 (18th-century interests)
4. Thurs. Sept. 13 Form and style – ancient art as international heritage (maker)
19th-century interests in and approaches to Greek art and Roman art. Enlightenment; the big digs, international academies, and national collections; Furtwängler, Kopienkritikand the ancient artist; Hegel and Zeitgeist
Essential reading Bartman 2015: 21-24 [11-12 online] (collections); Dyson 2006: 156-9 (Furtwängler); Hall 2014: 5-12 (history of study of classical archaeology); Marvin 2008: 144-50, 164-7 (Furtwängler andMeisterforschung); Smith 2002: 59-72 (artists and art); Whitley 2001: 32-36 (19th-century big digs)
5. Tues. Sept. 18 Connoisseurship and social history – ‘identities’ (context)
Late 19th and early 20th-century approaches to ancient art. Morelli and Beazley; taxonomies of ancient art and artists: effects of wars, nationalism, and communism; social history, style, and non-elite art; ‘decline’ of Roman art and teleology of late antique art; Marx
Essential reading: Borbein 2014: 527-35 [10-18 online] (connoisseurship); Elsner 2000: esp 251-5, 260-2 (teleology); Marvin 2008: 139-44 (Morelli and connoisseurship); Stewart 2008: 4-9 (New Art History); Whitley 2001: 36-41 (Beazley)
6. Thurs. Sept. 20 New archaeology – new questions for ancient art (viewer)
Mid-later 20th-century approaches to ancient art. New Art History, New Archaeology; (post)processualism and ‘the great divide’; the contextual and historical turn; Freud; Derrida; Renfrew
Essential reading: Fehr 2014: 579-85, 595 [1-7, 17 online] (sociohistorical approaches); Hall 2014: 13-16 (classical archaeology and archaeology); Renfrew 1980: esp 295-8 (archaeology, anthropology, classics); Smith 2002: 67-74, 96-97 (the ‘contextual turn’)
7. Fri. Sept. 21 Practical Review: Course work requirements and approaches
Practical approaches to writing an annotated bibliography and research paper
Medieval art: the development of the field (Prof. Salvadori)
8. Tues. Sept. 25 Medieval Art: Discovered, invented, and evaluated (Object)
16-18th-centuries concepts about the art and architecture of a ‘Middle Age’:from decline to sublime; Renaissance, Reformation, Counterreformation; Antiquarians and Nationalists; Enlightenment, beauty, and the sublime; Wincklemann and Goethe; the Gothic Revival
Essential reading: Rudolph in Rudolph 2006: 1-16 (historiography of western Medieval art)
9. Thurs. Sept. 27 The Romantic, the Nationalist, the Orientalist, and the Universalist Middle Ages (Object and Maker)
19th-century concepts about the art and architecture of a ‘Middle Age’: Gothic Art ‘enshrined’; the ‘birth’ of late antiquity: Riegl and Kunstwollenand the Rome vs Orient debate; Orientalism and Islamic Art
Essential reading: Rudolph in Rudolph 2006: 16-26 (historiography of western Medieval art); Wharton 1995: 1-14 (Orientalism and late antiquity); Blair and Bloom 2003: 152-6 (historiography Islamic art)
Assignment Annotated bibliography 1 due
10. Tues. Oct. 2 Formalism, Iconography and Intent (Object, Maker and Context)
c. 1900-1950 concepts about the art and architecture of a ‘Middle Age:’ formalism, style and iconography; the iconography of style; semiotics; social art history; the impact of politics and war in Europe; the “medieval U.S.A.”; the “birth” of Romanesque and the impact of Modern Art
Essential reading: Rudolph in Rudolph 2006: 26-39 (historiography western med. Art); Cassidy in Cassidy 1993: 3-11 (historiography of and issues in iconographic studies)
11. Thurs. Oct. 4
Perspective (Maker and Context)
c. 1950-1990 concepts about the art and architecture of a ‘Middle Age:’ historiographical awareness, building on and critiquing the field
Essential reading: Moxey in Cassidy 1993: 27-31 (critique of Panofsky via new emphases in the study of iconography); Mango 1991 (approaches to Byzantine Architecture)
Early Modern and Modern art: the development of the field (Prof. Linford)
12. Tues. Oct. 9 “Making” the maker: Figures of the Artist (maker)
Raffaello Sanzio’s The Transfiguration (1516-1520) serves here as a case study for the ways in which the figure of the artist (as courtier, poet, philosopher, scientist, genius or seer) is intimately linked to the emergence of the monograph (Vasari), the first and foundational genre of art historical writing. How “Raphael” is then used in later historiography to analyse and interpret his paintings, (high) Renaissance art, the atemporal classical ideal, or, in some systems, art generally, will be the focus of this class.
Essential Reading: Vasari 1913 [1550, 1568]:329-338 (Raphael’s Transfigurationexplained in biographical terms); Burckhardt 1929 [1860]: 141-147 (context to explain the biography and figure of the artist); Blunt 1958 (Raphael historiography refashioned to suit the needs and ideas of its epoch): 2-20
13. Thurs. Oct. 11 Bernini and the Baroques: problems with “style”(object)
Bernini’s works serve as test-case for the fluid definitions of Baroque “style”. What makes these objects similar enough to be studied as part of the same corpus, particularly given the variety of mdia (architecture, sculpture, drawing, painting and the performing arts) that “Baroque” is used to characterize?
Essential reading: Wölfflin 1964 [1888]: 15-26 (stylistic principles of Baroque); Payne 2010: 16-24 (what changes in historiography of Baroque makes it a possible object of study for Riegl); Connors 1999: i-xii (Wittkower on Baroque: legacy and shortcomings); Minor 2015:25-31 (“traditional” art history augmented by literary studies’ notion of performativity).
Assignment Annotated bibliography 2 due
14. Tues. Oct. 16 Norms and Institutions, Power and Context: the (Neo-) Classical ideal as context-dependant (context)
XVIIth and XVIIIth century ideas of the classical, at the very moment when the Western canon being formalized and reified (XVIIth c) and then politically instrumentalized in new ways (XVIIIth c), is examined in light of the way in which art historians have discussed Poussin, as compared to David or Canova, to make larger claims about the canons of beauty, taste and the political uses of the visual arts.
Essential reading: Carrier 2016: 69-80 (short history of Poussin interpretation); Boime 1985: xix-xxv (social art history introduction to neoclassicism)
15. Thurs. Oct. 18 Romantic Color: “Reading” Intention (viewer)
By focusing on debates surrounding color as a locus and leitmotiv of Romantic historiography, we will ask why color recurrently made to function as the viewer’s “instinctive” or “empathetic” key to deciphering an artist’s intention, subjectivity and expression. Further: how do shifting conceptions of painters’ techniques match up with the larger (philosophical or aesthetic) systems of Diderot, Kant, Hegel, Goethe? The historiography of emblematic works by Friedrich, Turner and Delacroix provide punctual case-studies for an analysis of the imputed relations between subjectivity, technique and reception.
Essential reading: Gage 1999: 162-176 (theory and reception of color: Turner; Runge, Goethe); Phillips 2005: 342-357 (color vision and optics in relation to XIXth c art criticism); Rosen, Zerner 1984: 7-4 (aesthetic revolution, subjectivity)
16. Tues. Oct. 23 Abstract Expressionism as Case Study: The Historical Avant-gardes, the so-called “End of Art” and “End of Art History.”
Jackson Pollock’s painting will serve as a test case to inquire into: the problems of periodisation and categorisation; how the instruments and methods we have seen up to now (iconology, kunstwollen, formalism, historical determinism, post-structuralist theories, the “new art history”…) produce different objects of study. Students are asked to prepare for class by thinking synthetically and diachronically about the recurrence of toolsand paradigmsoperative in the historiography of art before Modernism (Vasari, Bellori, Winckelmann, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Riegl, Hegel, Wölfflin, Panofsky, Gombrich, Freud, Blunt, Burckhardt, Schapiro, Foucault, Derrida, Werckmeister, Moxey, Zerner, Preziosi) are applied to Abstract Expressionism.
Essential reading: Frascina 1985: 91-103 (introduction to the critical debate on Abstract Expressionism); Clark 1990: 186-194 (cultural history and notion of abstraction in Pollock); Krauss 1993: 221-232 (critic vs. art historian, problem of Pollock sources)
PART 2: CURRENT APPROACHES IN ART HISTORY
Ancient art: case studies in current developments of the field (Prof. Hansen)
17. Thurs. Oct. 25 Thinking about ‘the object’
What might influence artistic forms and styles? (top-down) cultural interaction; internal diversity; semantic systems; code-switching; Hölscher
Essential reading Marlowe 2013: 64-70 (constancy of style); Varner 2006: 284-7 (eclectic rhetoric); Wallace-Hadrill 1998: esp 83-86 (‘code switching’)
18. Tues. Oct. 30 Thinking about ‘the maker’
Who are the ‘makers’ of ancient art – workshops, artists, patrons? signatures and viewed statements; rethinking replication
Essential reading: Beard 1991: 12-19 (viewing Greek pots); Fejfer 2008: 29-33, 407-19, 426-9 (dedication, commission, portrait prototypes); Osborne 2010: esp 231-6, 243-51 (signatures on pots); Squire 2015: 175-88 [13-23 online] (signatures of Roman artists); Vout 2012: 446-52 (signatures and viewers)
Assignment Annotated bibliography 3 due
Thursday November 1 - No class (Italian holiday)
19. Tues. Nov. 6 Thinking about ‘the context’
What is the relationship between display context and object? Rhetoric of form (replication) and style (decorum); patronage and display
Essential reading: Marconi 2009: 157-63, 166-68 (Parthenon decoration); Marvin 2008: 151-64 (types and copies); Trimble 2014: 139-45, 145-49 (setting and replication of honorific portraits)
20. Thurs. Nov. 8 Thinking about ‘the viewer’
In the act of viewing, what is the relationship between viewer and object? Agency and performativity; visual culture and globalization; Gell
Essential reading Trimble 2015: 606-19 (viewing art); Versluys 2013: 436-40 (local and global); Smith 2002: 64-67 (art/material history), 98-102 (style as history); Whitley 2012: 579-90 (agency in art)
Medieval art: case studies in current developments of the field (Prof. Salvadori)
21. Fri. Nov. 9 Thinking about ‘the object’
How are the style, form, medium, and subject matter of artworks to be understood? Does medium, affect style, form and subject? Does subject affect style and form? How does “received” artistic tradition affect style, form and subject? How do contemporary (medieval) cultures affect style, form and subject?
Essential reading: Golombek in Hoffman 2007: (textiles and Islamic art)
22. Tues. Nov. 13 Thinking about ‘the maker’
Who are the ‘makers’ of medieval art – workshops, artists, patrons, “designers” in the form of learned advisers, anti-establishment forces?
Essential reading: Caskey in Rudolph 2006 (patronage in Romanesque and Gothic Art)
Assignment Research paper 1 due
23. Thurs. Nov. 15 Thinking about ‘the viewer’
Public, communal and private viewing contexts; accessibility and meaning; stasis and mobility; in the act of viewing, what is the relationship between the viewer and the artwork? How was seeing construed in the middle ages? How do feminism, gender and queer studies contribute to the discourse?
Essential reading: Caviness in Rudolph 2006 (medieval viewers)
24. Tues. Nov. 20 Thinking about ‘the context’
What is the role of the social, political, religious, ethnic and geographical context in the making of art? constructions of the Other; gender, foreigners, alterity, monsters and maps
Essential reading: Dale in Rudolph 2006 (historiography and state of question on the iconography of the monstrous)
Thursday November 22 - No class (US holiday)
Early Modern and Modern art: case studies in current developments of the field (Prof. Linford)
25. Tues. Nov. 27 Tools and Technology: Making, Meaning
Digital tools and recent thinking about science and technology have brought about new fields of art historical research. In the mid-1980s, the “iconic turn” was touted as generating a new method, “visual studies,” and providing an issue to the “end of art and its histories.” Concurrently, the history of science made its entrance into the history of art, enriching knowledge about both how objects are made and what objects mean. More recently, the “digital humanities” apply IT tools to unearth new facts and create new relationships between existing bodies of art historical knowledge.
Essential reading: J.L. Koerner (2004) “Bosch’s Equipment” Things that Talk, ed. L. Daston MIT Press: 27-65 (what objects mean vs. how they are made); L. Roberts (1997) “Education as a Narrative Endeavor” From Knowledge to Narrative,Smithsonian Institute Press:131-152 (objects and museum studies); J. Drucker (2013) “Is There a ‘Digital’ Art History?”, Visual Resources,29 (1-2): 5-13 (do digital tools enable new methods?).
Assignment Research paper 2 due
26. Thurs. Nov. 29 Identity Politics, Cultural Criticism and Social Values
Post-colonial studies, in the era of globalisation, and gender studies rooted, first in feminism and then LGBTQ+, have generated new queries about makers and viewers and the polysemia of many objects. The notions of disenfranchisement and empowerment, working with agency in particular, have extended studies of the Other to include objects, functions, cultures and identities previously overlooked by canonical art history.
Essential reading: Moxey, K. (1994) “Panofsky’s Melancolia” The Practice of Theory. Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History, Cornell University Press: 65-78 (cultural bias); Homi Baba; Said and TBA
27. Tues. Dec. 4 Beyond Narratives? Relativism and Revisionism
Can we ever escape meta-narratives, over-arching stories, teleology or our biases when practicing art history? Do we want to?
Essential reading: James Clifford “Art and culture system” (functions); K. Moxey (1994) “Introduction” The Practice of Theory:1-19 (Deconstruction to Relativism) and TBA.
28. Thurs. Dec. 6 Rules or Laws — Nominalism, Cognition
Who are the “authors” of art history and what truths can one hope to arrive at ? Are historiography, the history of history of art and cultural criticism forever stuck in the nature/culture quandary?
Essential reading: Michael Parsons, “Overview of the Five Stages” How We Understand Art. A Cognitive Developmental Account of Aesthetic Experience (1994 - 1987): 20-36(cognitive stages);H. Brinkman (2014), et alii, “Abstract Art as a Universal Language?” Leonardo 47/3, 256–257 (cognitive science); T.J. Clark (2006) excerpt from The Sight of Death. An Experiment in Art Writing, Yale University Press: (experience and tempo of looking, art writing as a genre).
ASSESSMENT
29/30. Dec. 10-14 Discussion of course themes (2 hours)
The class will take place on the ‘Final Exam’ time scheduled for the course. Exact day and time will be established.
Assignment Research paper 3 due