21 - 30 of 239 results for: ARTHIST

How are love and war comparable? Why must the creative impulse be accompanied by a destructive one? What do we really mean when we say that an artist "executed" a painting or a photographer "shot" a scene? This course explores the agony and ecstasy involved in the making and viewing of art. We will look at artists like Titian, Michelangelo, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio to think about the processes, techniques, and materiality of artworks, their warring political and iconographic ideologies, and their afterlives of conservation and care. Our discussions will expose the porous boundaries between love and war, pleasure and pain, life and death, presence and absence, in order to complicate the glorified legacy of the Italian Renaissance.

This course traces the history of the dome over two millennia, from temples to the gods to Temples of the State, and from cosmic archetype to architectural fetish. The narrative interweaves the themes of the dome as image of the Cosmos, religious icon, national landmark, and political monument. It examines the dome not only as a venue for structural innovation, but also metaphysical geometry and transcendent illusionism.nIndividual case studies will familiarize you with major architects from Hadrian to Richard Rogers and historical milestones from the Dome of the Rock to the Capitol in Washington DC. May be repeat for credit.

The modern medium of comics throughout its 150 year history (mostly North American). The flexibility of the medium explored through the genres of humorous and dramatic comic strips, superheroes, undergrounds, independents, kids and comics, journalism, and autobiography. Innovative creators including McCay, Kirby, Barry, Ware, and critical writings including McCloud, Eisner, Groenstee. Topics include text/image relations, panel-to-panel relations, the page, caricature, sequence, subjective expression, seriality, realism vs cartoonism, comics in the context of the fine arts, and relations to other media.

How come that, even if you have never set foot in Italy, you have heard of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael? What made them so incredibly famous, back then as well as today? This course examines the shooting of those, and other, artists to fame. It provides in-depth analyses of their innovative drawing practices and the making of masterpieces, taking you through a virtual journey across some of the greatest European and American collections. At the same time, this course also offers a study of the mechanics of success, how opportunities are created and reputations managed, and what role art plays in the construction of class and in today's national politics.

How does the past persist? How does it haunt us, making us who we are? What is it like to visit the sites of violence, the places of despair, and to find in them a source of contemplation, of perspective, and ultimately of a deepened faith in what is possible; to become, in short, a graver, deeper person? Considering the poetry, photography, and painting of the American Civil War--thinking of the work of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Abraham Lincoln, and many others--this course explores an urgent question: what is our ethical relation to the American past?

In 1500 Venice was the place you wanted to be. It wasn't just the capital of the world: it was also its scientific center. This course explores the conversation between the arts and the sciences in Renaissance Venice, and, thanks to remote teaching, it will do so from Venice! Students will discover the oldest anatomical theatre and many of Venice's arresting paintings to reflect on the blurred distinction between art and science, questioning if such a divide makes sense today.

Why do dating sites rely on photographs? Why do we believe that love is above all a visual force? How is pleasure, even erotic pleasure, achieved through looking? While the psychology of impressions offers some answers, this course uncovers the ways poets, songwriters, and especially artists have explored myths and promoted ideas about the coupling of love and seeing. Week by week, we will be reflecting on love as political critique, social disruption, and magical force. And we will do so by examining some of the most iconic works of art, from Dante's writings on lovesickness to Caravaggio's Narcissus, studying the ways that objects have shifted from keepsakes to targets of our cares. While exploring the visual roots and evolutions of what has become one of life's fundamental drives, this course offers a passionate survey of European art from Giotto's kiss to Fragonard's swing that elicits stimulating questions about the sensorial nature of desire and the human struggle to control emotions.

With their fantastic powers, mutable bodies, multiple identities, complicated histories, and visual dynamism, the American superhero has been a rich vehicle for fantasies (and anxieties) for 80+ years across multiple media: comics, film, animation, TV, games, toys, apparel. This course centers upon the body of the superhero as it incarnates allegories of race, queerness, hybridity, sexuality, gendered stereotypes/fluidity, politics, vigilantism, masculinity, and monstrosity. They also embody a technological history that encompasses industrial, atomic, electronic, bio-genetic, and digital.

This course will introduce early modern court cultures of South Asia focusing on Mughal art, architecture, and material culture between the 16th and 19th centuries. At the height of its rule, the Mughal Empire occupied a position of political, economic, and demographic dominance in the early modern period equaling and even surpassing the polities of the Iberian Peninsula, the Safavids and the Ottomans. A cosmopolitan Mughal "lndo-Persianate" court culture absorbed the intellectual heritage of Indic and Central Asian ideals, which filtered into imperial albums or muraqqas and Mughal material culture. The concurrent rise of European mercantile interests of the Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French East India Companies and interactions with China further contributed to a 'worlding' of Mughal aesthetics. By the end of the 18th century even as the Mughal State disintegrated under British colonial rule, its symbolic preeminence continued to inform a phase of modernization of Mughal art that revitalized commodity culture in the colony and the metropole alike.