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An introduction to major monuments, themes, styles, and media of East and South Asian visual arts, in their social, literary, religious, and political contexts. Through close study of primary monuments of architectural, pictorial, and sculptural arts and related texts, this course will explore ritual and mortuary arts; Buddhist arts across Asia; narrative and landscape images; and courtly, urban, monastic, and studio environments for art from Bronze Age to modern eras.

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.

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.

This course investigates houses, hideaways, and studios that artists and thinkers have designed for themselves with varying degrees of self-consciousness, from subconscious images of the self to knowing stages for the contemplative life. Case studies range from antiquity to the present, from the studio-house of Peter Paul Rubens to that of Kurt Schwitters; from the house-museum of Sir John Soane to the Vittoriale of Gabriele D'Annunzio; from the philosophical dwelling of the Emperor Hadrian to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This course will take place in Washington D.C.

Poetry and painting have often been called the "sister arts". Why? Sometimes a poem or a painting stands out to us, asking that we stay with it, that we remember it, although we cannot exactly say why. Poems have a way of making pictures in the mind, and paintings turn "rhymes" amid the people, places, and things they portray. Each is a concentrated world, inviting an exhilarating closeness of response: why does this line come first? Why does the artist include that detail? Who knows but that as we write and talk about these poems and pictures we will be doing what John Keats said a painter does: that is, arriving at a "trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty." Each week explore the kinship between a different pair of painter and poet and also focuses on a particular problem or method of interpretation. Some of the artist/poet combinations we will consider: Shakespeare and Caravaggio; Jorie Graham and (the photographer) Henri Cartier-Bresson; Alexander Pope and Thomas Gainsborough; William Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich; Christina Rossetti and Mary Cassatt; Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins; Thomas Hardy and Edward Hopper.

The complex and interdependent relationship between fashion and art. Topics include: the ways in which artists have used fashion in different art forms as a means to convey social status, identity, and other attributes of the wearer; the interplay between fashion designers and various art movements, especially in the 20th century; the place of prints, photography, and the Internet in fashion, in particular how different media shape how clothes are seen and perceived. Texts by Thorstein Veblen, Roland Barthes, Dick Hebdige, and other theorists of fashion.

Narratives of conflict, pacification, orthodoxy, nostalgia, and novelty through visual culture during the change of episteme from late medieval to early modern, 16th through early 19th centuries. The rhetorical messages of castles, teahouses, gardens, ceramics, paintings, and prints; the influence of Dutch and Chinese visuality; transformation in the roles of art and artist; tensions between the old and the new leading to the modernization of Japan.

The seminar and its study trip explore the hybrid character of the art of Medieval Spain between the sixth and the fifteenth centuries. Rather than strictly chronological, our exploration of the artistic production of Muslims, Jews, and Christians is structured around major topics such as imperial power, pilgrimage, word and image. The readings juxtapose historical studies of specifically Spanish sites and objects with theoretical approaches tied to the broader themes.