The School of the Arts · visual, musical & performing arts
Art History & Visual Culture
Looking as a discipline: the works, the periods, and the methods that make images legible.
From painted caves to Gothic light: the first survey, prehistoric through medieval.
Syllabus · 5 units · ~30 hours
Unit I — Before Writing
Cave painting and portable objects · What prehistoric images might have done · Megaliths and marked landscapes
Unit II — The Ancient Near East and Egypt
Ziggurats and stelae · The Egyptian canon: permanence as a style · Amarna's brief exception
Unit III — Greece and Rome
Kouros to contrapposto · The orders and the temple · Roman portraiture, concrete, and the arch
Unit IV — Faiths in Form
Early Christian and Byzantine mosaics · Islamic pattern and calligraphy · Romanesque pilgrimage churches
Unit V — The Gothic Achievement
Pointed arch, rib vault, flying buttress · Light as theology at Chartres · Manuscripts and the workshop system
Giotto to Rembrandt: perspective, patronage, and the arguments carried out in paint and stone.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~28 hours
Unit I — Florence and the New Painting
Giotto's weight · Perspective, demonstrated · Patronage: guilds and the Medici
Unit II — The High Renaissance
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael in context · Venice and color · Printing and Dürer's reach
Unit III — Crisis and Reform
Mannerism's knowing style · The Counter-Reformation's demands on images · Iconoclasm in the north
Unit IV — The Baroque
Caravaggio's light · Bernini and the theatrical sacred · Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Dutch market
Manet to the present: how modern art broke its rules on purpose, and what came after.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~26 hours
Unit I — Painting Modern Life
Manet and the Salon's rules · Impressionism as a method · Post-Impressionist departures
Unit II — The Avant-Gardes
Cubism's broken viewpoint · Expressionism and Fauve color · Abstraction: Kandinsky to Mondrian
Unit III — Between and After the Wars
Dada and the readymade · Surrealism · Abstract Expressionism and the shift to New York
Unit IV — Contemporary Questions
Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art · Performance and installation · The global turn and art now
Formal analysis to the meme feed: methods for reading images and the power behind them.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~20 hours
Unit I — Methods of Looking
Formal analysis · Iconography and iconology · The social history of art
Unit II — Images and Power
The gaze: who looks, who is looked at · Propaganda and persuasion · Museums and what display argues
Unit III — The Reproduced Image
Photography's claim to truth · Benjamin's reproduction essay, closely read · Memes, feeds, and attention
Unit IV — Writing About Images
Description before judgment · Building a visual argument · A short methods essay
Temple, scroll, bronze, and mask: major traditions of Asia, Africa, the Islamic world, and the Americas.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~28 hours
Unit I — South and East Asia
Hindu and Buddhist temple sculpture · Chinese landscape painting and the scholar's brush · Japanese prints and the floating world
Unit II — The Islamic World
Calligraphy as the highest art · Geometry and ornament · Architecture from Córdoba to Isfahan
Unit III — Africa
Benin bronzes and lost-wax casting · Masks in performance, not on walls · The colonial museum problem
Unit IV — The Americas and Oceania
Maya, Aztec, and Andean arts · North American traditions · Oceanic art and the navigator's sea