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Historiography and methodology.

May be repeated for credit.

The course explores the art and architecture of the Athenian Empire in the age of Pericles, and then considers the effects of civil war and plague on Greek art and society in the later 5th and early 4th centuries.

This course and its study trip to the Getty (Los Angeles) to view the new Byzantine exhibition explores the art and architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Damascus, Thessaloniki, and Palermo, 4th-15th centuries. Applying an innovative approach, we will probe questions of phenomenology and aesthetics, focusing our discussion on the performance and appearance of spaces and objects in the changing diurnal light, in the glitter of mosaics and in the mirror reflection and translucency of marble.

What is an image? The medieval response was tied to religious identity. At the core of the debate was whether the image was just a mimetic representation or a living entity: matter imbued with divine spirit. Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West each developed their own positions and used it as a platform for political legitimacy. We will study the development of the medieval image theories by focusing on specific monuments and objects and by reading both primary sources in translation and current scholarly interpretations.

The course is an introduction to western medieval art approached primarily through distinctions of materials and media. We work with a combination of medieval and later sources, often engaging with the modern objects and spaces available for study on campus in order to create new perspectives on the historical material. Medieval case studies are chosen that raise particularly complex issues of materiality, mixed-media form, and cross-media citation.

A survey of the major innovations in Northern European painting ca. 1400-1600, in light of the social status of the artist between city and court. In the early fifteenth century painters began to render an idealized world down to its smallest details in ways that engaged new devotional practices. Later Hieronymus Bosch would identify the painter's imagination with the bizarre and grotesque. In response to Renaissance humanism, some painters introduced classical mythology and allegorical subjects in their works, and many traveled south to absorb Italianate pictorial styles. We will be visiting art museums in San Francisco and Stanford. May be repeat for credit.