Specialized courses offered periodically on specific aspects of the art of the early modern world. Courses are normally research-led topics on an area of current academic concern.
May be taken more than once for credit with different topics.

Satisfies "the Early Modern World" core course requirement for Art History majors

The Playful Renaissance

Culture emerges in the form of play, contends the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in Homo ludens (1938). Play is older and more fundamental than culture. Contrary to popular belief, it is not easy, frivolous, or foolish, but embodies the very opposite of those qualities. Espousing Huizinga’s definition, this course addresses the entwinement of play and culture, taking as its focus the art of Renaissance Europe. Through the examination of works by artists and writers including Mantegna, Michelangelo, Dürer, Bruegel, Vives, Erasmus, and Rabelais, this course investigates how the play-element—and adjacent notions such as leisure, difficulty, error, risk, and wit—shaped Renaissance visuality. In addition to analyzing playful forms—visual and rhetoric trickeries, for instance—it incorporates playthings, including games, toys, and puzzles, from both the early modern period and more recent times, as learning instruments. The objective of this course is to map the contour of Renaissance art through a reexamination of play and explore the value of cleverness, acumen, and delight.

Upon completion of this course, students are expected to:

•      Outline key theories of play

•      Identify and explain the visual and conceptual difficulties of monuments covered in readings and discussions

•      Develop skills in puzzle-solving (ungraded); verbalize observed challenges and applied solutions

•      Contextualize concepts such as ambiguity, humor, error, risk, and wit with regard to their expression in Renaissance art

•      Understand the social history of Renaissance Europe pertaining to playful visual expressions

•    Reflect on the relationship between puzzle-solving and formal analysis, as well as the translatability between mechanical and visual challenges

•      Develop research questions informed by examinations of visual properties, original creative and spectatorial contexts, and interpretive discourses

•      Incorporate theoretical insights into analytical work in a clear and accessible manner, avoiding jargon

•    Hone research and writing skills, including finding pertinent sources, formulating persuasive arguments, maintaining suitable interdisciplinarity, 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:

A major exam (midterm or final) cannot be made up without the permission of the Dean’s Office. Contact the Dean’s Office prior to the exam to be missed. Absences due to the observance of a religious holiday will normally be excused. Notify me by the end of the Add/Drop period so that arrangements may be made for missed work.

T Sept 2            Course Introduction

Th Sept 4          Redefining Play: Homo ludens and The Grasshopper

T Sept 9            The Art of Concealing Art

Th Sept 11        Analogized Perceptions: Franco-Flemish Formalism in Art, Music, and Poetry

T Sept 16          Fooling the Eye: From Perspective to Illusionism

 Th Sept 18        Fooling the Eye: Grisaille

T Sept 23          Between Image and Object: The Illusionism of Flat Art

Th Sept 25        Hieronymus Bosch’s Picture of Unlikeness

F Sept 26          Visit to Villa Farnesina

T Sept 30          Early Modern Wonder and the Technology of Enchantment

Th Oct 2            Strategic Interactions

T Oct 7              Wit, Humor, and Subversion

Th Oct 9            Midterm Review

T Oct 14            Midterm Exam

Th Oct 16          Difficulty as a Visual System

T Oct 21            Bruegel and the Puzzle Picture

Th Oct 23          Self-Knowledge and the Nature of Man: Bruegel and Erasmus

T Oct 28            Puzzle Presentation

Th Oct 30          In Praise of Idleness: Genres and Images of Play

T Nov 4             The Pretty Ugly: Representing the Deformed

Th Nov 6           Let’s Play!

T Nov 11           Peer Review

Th Nov 13         Anthropomorphism and Potential Imagery

T Nov 18           Conjuring Imagelessness during the Reformation

Th Nov 20         The Anti-Renaissance as a Cultural Paradigm

T Nov 25           Research Project Presentation

T Dec 2             Research Project Presentation

Th Dec 4           Final Review

OVERVIEW OF KEY BIBLIOGRAPHIC WORKS FOR THE COURSE

Anderson, Kirsti. Optical Illusions in Rome: A Mathematical Travel Guide, trans. B. Viktor (MAA Press, 2019).

Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood, trans. R. Baldick (Cape, 1962).

Armstrong, Adrian. “Reception and Interference: Reading Jean Molinet’s Rebus-Poems.” Word & Image 23, no. 3 (2007): 350–361.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (MIT Press, 1968).

Barthes, Roland. The Neutral, translated by Rosalind Krause and Daniel Hollier (Columbia University Press, 2005).

________. “Arcimboldo, Or Magician and Rhetoriqueur.” In Roland Barthes: The Responsibility of Forms, translated by Richard Howard (Hill and Wang, 1985).

Battisti, Eugenio. L’antirinascimento (Feltrinelli, 1962).

Beck, Jonathan. “Formalism and Virtuosity, Franco-Burgundian Poetry, Music, and Visual Art, 1470–1520,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 4 (1984): 644–667. 

Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (The University of Chicago Press, 1994)

Berger, Harry Jr. “Sprezzatura and the Absence of Grace.” In The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation, edited by Daniel Javitch (Norton, 2002).

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: MacMillan, 1911).

Bloom, James. “Performance as Paradigm: The Visual Culture of the Burgundian Court.” In Staging the Court of Burgundy, edited by Wim Blockmans and Walter Prevenier (Brepols, 2013)

Boldt-Irons, Leslie Anne, Corrado Federici, and Ernesto Virgulti, eds. Disguise, Deception, Trompe-L'oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Lang, 2009).

Burke, Peter. “The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe.” Past & Present, no. 146 (1995): 136–50.

Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1958).

Capron, Emma. The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance (Yale, 2023).

Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtiers (Scribner’s, 1903).

Carthy, Ita Mac. “Grace and the ‘Reach of Art’ in Castiglione and Raphael.” Word & Image 25, no. 1 (2009): 33–45.

Cole, Michael, and Christopher Wood. “L’antirinascimento by Eugenio Battisti.” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (2013): 651–56.

Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxia Epidemica: the Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton University Press, 1966).

Cranston, Jodi. “The Hidden Signatures of Titian.” Word & Image 34, no. 4 (2018): 372–87.

Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of the Nature, 1150–1750 (Zone Books, 1998).

Della Rocca de Candal, Geri, Anthony Grafton, and Paolo Sachet, eds. Printing and Misprinting: A Companion to Mistakes and in-House Corrections in Renaissance Europe (1450–1650) (Oxford, 2023).

Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille, ed. Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l'Oeil Painting (Aldershot: 2002).

Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings: A New Translation with Critical Commentary, trans. Robert Adams (Norton, 1989).

Falkenburg, Reindert. The Land of Unlikeness: Hieronymus Bosch, the Garden of Earthly Delights (W Books, 2011).

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window from Alberti to Microsoft (MIT Press, 2006).

Furey, Constance. “Erring Together: Renaissance Humanists in Certainty’s Shadow.” The Journal of Religion 95, no. 4 (2015): 454–76. 

Gamboni, Dario. Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (Reaktion Books, 2002).

Gell, Alfred. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote (Clarendon Press, 1994).

________. “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps,” Journal of Material Culture 1 (1996): 15–38.

Gibson, Walter. Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter (University of California Press, 2006).

Goffman, Irving. Strategic Interactions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971).

Herman, Nicholas. “Excavating the Page: Virtuosity and Illusionism in Italian Book Illumination, 1460–1520.” Word & Image 27, no. 2 (2011): 190–211.

Honig, Elizabeth. Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature (Reaktion Books, 2019).

Huizinga, Johan. Homo ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950).

Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages (Normandy Press, 2013).

Huppert, Ann C. Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi (Yale University Press, 2015).

Kavaler, Ethan Matt. Renaissance Gothic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012).

Koerner, Joseph Leo. Bosch & Bruegel. From enemy painting to everyday life (Princeton University Press, 2016).

________. The Reformation of the Image (Reaktion Books, 2004).

Lazzarini, Elena. “Wonderful Creatures: Early Modern Perceptions of Deformed Bodies.” Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 3 (2011): 415–31.

 Magli, Patrizia. “Morphologies de l’invisible,” Visible 7 (2010): 47–56.

Marin, Louis. “The Logic of Secrecy,” in Cross-Readings (Humanities Press International, 1998).

Marrow, James. Pictorial Invention in Netherlandish Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle Ages: The Play of Illusion and Meaning (Peeters, 2005).

Meadow, Mark. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Early Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (Waanders, 2002).

Melion, Walter, Bret Rothstein, and Michel Weemans, eds. The Anthropomorphic Lens (Brill, 2014).

Merback, Mitchell. Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I. (Zone Books, 2017).

Nagel, Alexander, and Lorenzo Pericolo, eds. Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Ashgate, 2010).

Nelson, Jennifer. Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).

Normore, Christina. A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Orrock, Amy. “Homo ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the Humanist Educators,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 4, no. 2 (2012).

Panofsky, Erwin. Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Harvard University Press, 1953).

________. Perspective as Symbolic Form, translated by Christopher S. Wood (Zone Books, 1997).

Parshall, Peter. “Some Visual Paradoxes in Northern Renaissance Art.” Wascana Review (1974): 97–104.

Preimesberger, Rudolf. Paragons and Paragone (The Getty Research Institute, 2011).

Rabelais, François. Gargantua and Pentagruel, translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux (William Benton, 1952).

Rebecchini, Guido. “Castiglione and Erasmus: Towards a Reconciliation?” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1998): 258–60. 

Rebhorn, Wayne. “The Metamorphoses of Moria: Structure and Meaning in The Praise of Folly,” PMLA 89, no. 3 (1974): 463–76.

Rigolot, François. “The Renaissance Fascination with Error: Mannerism and Early Modern Poetry.” Renaissance Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2004): 1219–34. 

Rosenkranz, Karl. “Aesthetic of Ugliness.” Log 22 (2011): 101–11.

Rosenthal, Angela, David Bindman, and Adrian Randolph, eds. No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity (University Press of New England, 2015).

Rothstein, Bret. “Better Living Through Misinterpretation,” in The Primacy of the Image in Northern European Art, 1400–1700, eds. Debra Taylor Cashion et al., 90–102 (Brill, 2017).

________. The Shape of Difficulty: A Fan Letter to Unruly Objects (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).

________. “Beer and Loafing in Antwerp.” Art History 35, no. 5 (2012): 886–907.

Russell, Bertrand. “In Praise of Idleness,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine (June 1, 1932): 552–559.

Schelling, Thomas C. The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard University Press, 1960).

Shearman, John. Mannerism: Style and Civilization (Penguin Books, 1967).

Sicart, Migue. Play Matters (The MIT Press, 2014).

Silver, Larry. Art and Dis-illusion in the Long Sixteenth Century (Brill, 2023).

Simmel, Georg. “Flirtation,” in Georg Simmel, on Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans. G. Oakes, 133–152 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

Snow, Edward. Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children’s Games N(orth Point Press, 1997).

Starn, Randoph, and Loren Partridge. Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600

(University of California Press, 1992).

Steiner, George. “On Difficulty,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36, no. 3 (1978): 263–276. 

Stoichiță, Victor Ieronim. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (University of Toronto Press, 1978).

Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play (Harvard University Press, 1997). 

Turel, Noa. Living Pictures: Jan van Eyck and Painting’s First Century (Yale, 2020).

Turner, James. The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Vives, Juan Luis. Tudor School-Boy Life, translated by Foster Watson (J.M. Dent & Company, 1908).

Weemans, Michel. “Les rhyparographes,” Parade 8 (2008): 72–91.

Weemans, Michel. “Herri met de Bles's Sleeping Peddler: An Exegetical and Anthropomorphic Landscape.” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 3 (2006): 459-81.

Zirpolo, Lilian H., ed. “The Most Noble of the Senses”: Anamorphosis, Trompe-l’oeil, and Other Optical Illusions in Early Modern Art (Zephyrus, 2016).

Zumthor, Paul. Le masque et la lumière: la poétique des grands rhétoriqueurs (Seuil, 1978).