The Nuremberg Chronicle, a world history book published by the foremost humanists, artists, producers, and merchants in the southern German city Nuremberg in 1493, exemplifies history’s capability of irony. Despite its proclaimed global perspective and serendipitous conception in that fateful year of 1492, the book, one of the finest examples of incunables, mentions no Christopher Columbus or his discovery. The omission was not deliberate, as the new world remained an “unknown unknown” to the German team in 1492. Yet the screeching silence offers peculiar insight into the spiritual, intellectual, and communicational realities of Europe, a continent then standing at the doorstep of modernity, unaware of the sea change soon to be brought about by wider discoveries, mass communication, and the colossal enterprise of colonization.

 A visual culture survey, this course begins with the blind spot of the Nuremberg Chronicle and examines the history of the early modern world—Christian Europe or otherwise—documented in and by a vast array of cultural artefacts. It attends to early modern works across geographic, political, and religious confines, drawing its narrative from not only Renaissance Italy, but also Ming China, not only early modern Amsterdam, but also golden age Baghdad. It emphasizes, in particular, objects and sites at the forefront of cultural exchange—such as Rembrandt’s Mughal miniatures or the Qianlong Emperor’s European-style Summer Palace—and the long shadow they cast on the formation of cultural identity. This course also gives attention to the question of media. Maintaining that medium does more than mediate, but also shapes, the message, it investigates how different media, such as oil painting, the printing press, and life-casting—and the technological advancement tantamount to their invention—figure in the cultural production of the early modern world.

 Designed to provide non-art history majors with an overview of early modern visual cultures, this course builds its narrative upon examinations of individual monuments, in particular their material property, building circumstance, and cultural impact. The objective of this course is to develop the skills needed to critically understand, evaluate, and write about the cultural heritage of the early modern world and beyond.

This course will enable the students to:

·       Develop a familiarity with key monuments from different geographic and cultural spheres of the early modern world.

·       Cultivate the kind of visual literacy needed to identify artefacts previously unknown to them.

·       Acquire an understanding of the roles different cultural artefacts played in their changeful context, be it social, political, or spiritual.

·       Hone skills in collecting pertinent sources, formulating persuasive arguments, giving nuanced reasoning, and communicating original ideas.

Attendance in classes:

Attendance is mandatory. Notification must be sent by email before—or, in the case of unexpected events, at your earliest convenience after—the absence.

Attendance at exams:

Schedule

(R) Reserved readings in Frohring Library

(M) Readings uploaded to Moodle

(FL) Readings you are responsible for locating, using the Frohring Library catalogue

M Sept 1         Course Introduction: Ways of Seeing

Overview of syllabus, grading criteria, explanation of assignments, overall expectation, preliminary discussion 

W Sept 3         What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Art History?

*(R, M – URL only) Gombrich, Ernst. The Story of Art. Phaidon, 1966. (Read “Introduction”) 

(R, M – URL only) D’Alleva, Anne. Look! The Fundamentals of Art History. Prentice Hall, 2004. (Read part of chapter 2 “The Fundamentals of Interpretation: Formal and Contextual Analysis,” pp. 23–48)

M Sept 8         The Pyrotechnic End of the Middle Ages

Gardner, 567–573

*(FL) Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages. Lucknow Books, 2016. (Read chapters 1) 

W Sept 10       Trecento Italian Art

Gardner, 419–436

Explore: 3D model of the Arena Chapel and Haltadefinizione Arena Chapel

   M Sept 15       Art of Quattrocento Florence: Sculpture and Architecture

Gardner, 593–601, 615–621

W Sept 17         Art of Quattrocento Florence: Painting and the Invention of Linear Perspective

Gardner, 606–614

Watch: Perspective Drawing

M Sept 22       Early Netherlandish Painting

Gardner, 574–580

*(R) Harbison, Craig. The Mirror of the Artist: Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context. Prentice Hall, 1995. (Read pp. 31–38)

*(R) Bol, Marjolijn. The Varnish and the Glaze. The University of Chicago Press, 2023. (Read pp. 191–198, 201–207, 212–217)

Watch: BBC Northern Renaissance – The Supreme Art

   W Sept 24       Art of Italian Renaissance Courts

Gardner, 624–632

Explore: Camera Picta and Zeuxis VR – Camera Picta

Read: The Duke of Urbino’s Magical Studiolo

M Sept 29       The Age of Giants

Gardner, 635–642, 645–647

*(M) Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Penguin Classics, 1991. (Read passages 35–45, or pp. 55–67)

W Oct 1           Rebuilding Rome

Gardner, 642–645, 647–652, 655–659 

M Oct 6           Circa 1492

*(R, email) Silver, Larry. Europe Views the World, 1500–1700. Lund Humphries, 2022. (Read chapter 3, “The Americas”)

* Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus novus. Letter to Lorenzo Pietro di Medici, 1504.

   W Oct 8           Mid-term review

M Oct 13         Midterm exam

W Oct 15         The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Read: The Man Behind the Bible: Johannes Gutenberg’s Life of “Adventure and Art”

*(FL) Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Taylor & Francis, 1982 (2012). (Read pp. 115–121, 129–135) 

Screening: Johannes Gutenberg: Creator of the First Printing Press

M Oct 20         Art and Nature: Renaissance Germany 

Garnder, 685–691

*(R) Stechow, Wolfgang. Northern Renaissance Art 1400–1600. Prentice Hall, 1966. (Read the excerpt of Dürer’s theoretical writings, pp. 111–121)

Browse: What is Printmaking?

Watch: BBC Northern Renaissance – The Birth of the Artist

W Oct 22         Landscape Painting in China

Gardner, 488–491, 1060–1063, 1067–1068

*(R, M – URL only) Sullivan, Michael. The Arts of China. University of California Press, 1984. (Read pp. 156–158)

*(M) Guo Xi. “Advice on Landscape.” In Hawai’i Reader of Traditional Chinese Culture. University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.

M Oct 27         The Reformation and Sixteenth-Century European Art

Gardner, 692–702

*(R) Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. The University of Chicago Press, 1994. (Read pp. 458–470)

Browse: Interactive Site of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs 

W Oct 29         The Counter-Reformation and The Anti-Renaissance

Gardner, 653–654; 659–660; 668–676 

*(R) Shearman, John. Mannerism: Style and Civilization. Penguin Books, 1967. (Read pp. 15–48) 

M Nov 3          Art in the Age of Rembrandt

Gardner, 739–752

Watch: Simon Schama’s Power of Art: Rembrandt

W Nov 5          Pepper, Maps, and Porcelain: The Global Dutch Republic

Gardner, 753–757

*(R, email) Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Harvard University Press, 1990. (Read pp. 104–110)

Watch: The Dutch Golden Age EP05 - The VOC

Browse Atlas of Mutual Heritage

M Nov 10        The Language of Islamic Architecture

Gardner, 293–303, 306–312, 1044–1049

W Nov 12        Baroque Rome 

Gardner, 711–729

*(FL) Horn, Andrew. “Andrea Pozzo and the Jesuit “Theatres” of the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of Jesuit Studies 6 (2019): 213–248. (Read pp. 213–230) 

M Nov 17        The First Museums: Kunstwunderkammern

(email) Smith, Jeffrey Chipps. Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire. Reaktion Books, 2022. (Read pp. 18–23, 82–84, 90–125) 

Browse: Online Sammlung of Schloss Ambras

   W Nov 19        Cultural Hybridity in Ming and Qing China

Gardner, 1064–1070 

*(FL) Kleutghen, Kristina. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces. University of Washington Press, 2015. (Read chapter 5, “Staging Europe”)

M Nov 24        Art of the Kingdom of Benin 

(M – URL only) Blier, Suzanne Preston. The Royal Arts of Africa: The Majesty of Form. Prentice Hall, 2003. (read pp. 43–49; 60–64)

Watch: Art, Loot, and Empire

*(M) Wood, Paul. “Display, Restitution and World Art History: The Case of the ‘Benin Bronzes.’” Visual Culture in Britain 13 (1): 115–37.

   *(M) Optional: Appiah, Kwame Anthoy. “Whose Culture Is It Anyway?” In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Alan Lane/Penguin, 2006), 115–35. 

   W Nov 26        Essay Presentation

M Dec 1          Essay Presentation 

W Dec 3          Final Review

(FL) Cooke, Edward S. “Introduction.” In Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History. Princeton University Press, 2022.

Sun Dec 7         Formal and contextual essay due on Moodle by 11:59pm