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:

M Sept 1 Course Introduction: Ways of Seeing

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

M Sept 8 The Pyrotechnic End of the Middle Ages

W Sept 10 A New Way of Representation: Early Netherlandish Painting

M Sept 15 Art and Architecture in the Italian City-States

W Sept 17 The Invention of Linear Perspective

M Sept 22 Renaissance Giants in Florence

W Sept 24 Renaissance Rome

M Sept 29 Circa 1492

W Oct 1 The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

M Oct 6 Buddhist Grottoes in China

W Oct 8 Mid-term review

M Oct 13 Midterm exam

W Oct 15 Landscape Painting in China

M Oct 20 Art and Nature: Renaissance Germany

W Oct 22 The Anti-Renaissance

M Oct 27 Art in the Age of Rembrandt

W Oct 29 Pepper, Maps, and Porcelain: The Global Dutch Republic

M Nov 3 Between Samarcand and Agra: The Language of Islamic Architecture

W Nov 5 The First Museums: Kunstwunderkammern

M Nov 10 Ukiyo-e: An Urban Art

W Nov 12 Baroque Rome

M Nov 17 Art of the Kingdom of Benin

W Nov 19 Baroque Art in Spain and New Spain

M Nov 24 Cultural Hybridity in Ming and Qing China

W Nov 26 Essay Presentation

 M Dec 1 Essay Presentation

 W Dec 3 Final Review

OVERVIEW OF KEY BIBLIOGRAPHIC WORKS FOR THE COURSE

 Bailey, Gauvin A. Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing (Penguin Books, 1972).

Blair, Sheila, Jonathan Bloom, and Richard Ettinghausen. The Art and Architecture of Islam

1250-1800 (Yale University Press, 1995).

Blier, Suzanne Preston. The Royal Arts of Africa: The Majesty of Form (New

York: H.N. Abrams, 1998).Brotton, Jerry. The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 

 Burghartz, Susanna, et al., eds. Sites of Mediation: Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and beyond, 1450-1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

 Campbell, Stephen J, and Michael Wayne Cole. A New History of Italian Renaissance Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017).

Carrier, David. A World Art History and Its Objects (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 

 Cooke, Edward S. Global Objects toward a Connected Art History (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Gardner, Helen, and Fred S Kleiner. Gardner's Art through the Ages: A Global History (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2020).

 Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2016).

 Harbison, Craig. The Mirror of the Artist: Northern Renaissance Art in Its Historical Context (Prentice Hall, 1995).

 Landau, David, and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

Levenson, Jay A, ed. Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (Yale University Press, 1991).

Mason, Penelope E. History of Japanese Art (New York: Abrams, 1993).Nuttall, Paula. From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400-1500 (Yale University Press, 2004).

 Shaw, Wendy M. K. What Is “Islamic” Art?: Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

 Steinhardt, Nancy Shatzman. Chinese Architecture: A History (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Sullivan, Michael. The Arts of China (University of California Press, 2008).

 Welch, Stuart Cary. India: Art and Culture, 1300-1900 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985).