71 - 80 of 239 results for: ARTHIST

This seminar uncovers the aesthetic principles and spiritual operations at work in Hagia Sophia, the church dedicated to Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. Rather than a static and inert structure, the Great Church emerges as a material body that comes to life when the morning or evening light resurrects the glitter of its gold mosaics and when the singing of human voices activates the reverberant and enveloping sound of its vast interior. Drawing on art and architectural history, liturgy, musicology, and acoustics, this course explores the Byzantine paradigm of animation arguing that it is manifested in the visual and sonic mirroring, in the chiastic structure of the psalmody, and in the prosody of the sung poetry. Together these elements orchestrate a multi-sensory experience that has the potential to destabilize the divide between real and oneiric, placing the faithful in a space in between terrestrial and celestial. A short film on aesthetics and samples of Byzantine chant digitally imprinted with the acoustics of Hagia Sophia are developed as integral segments of this research; they offer a chance for the student to transcend the limits of textual analysis and experience the temporal dimension of this process of animation of the inert.

As modern viewers we enter with confidence and detachment the interiors of medieval churches. We are rarely aware of their psychological impact, placing the viewer under the watchful eye of the divine Judge depicted in the apex of the dome. By contrast, medieval viewers responded to this gaze with fear, guilt, and an urgency to repent for their sinful selves. How is this experience of abjection created? We seek answers by analyzing the spatial structuring of the visual programs and by engaging with the role the liturgy (poetry and song) plays in producing medieval subjectivity. The geographical scope includes churches in the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. The medieval material is put in conversation with modern approaches to the concepts of subjectivity, surveillance, and control (Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Marion, and Adriana Cavarero).

The seminar reveals the religious and ethnic hybridity of the art medieval Spain, where the lives, material cultures, and artistic practices of Muslims, Christians, and Jews were more intertwined than any other region of the medieval world. We work thematically rather than strictly chronologically in order to build a model of engagement with medieval art in which the movement of ideas and objects between the three major religions is in itself a focus of study.

Mary has been the most influential female figure in Christianity. Her powers stem from her paradoxical virginal motherhood. Victory over nature means indomitable power. She was perceived as the general of the Christian armies and the protector of cities, states, and rulers. Mary inherited and combined the functions of the ancient goddesses of war, victory, and maternity and offered an enduring Christian equivalent. This course explores images, relics, chants, and processions in the public and private expressions of the Marian cult.

This course explores the changing definition of the concept of an image in the medieval Mediterranean brought about by the rise of Islam as a new religion in the seventh century. By the eight century four political entities - the Umayyads, the Byzantines, the Carolingians, and the papacy - competed for power and influence, insisting that their legitimacy issued from their correct understanding of the manifestation of the divine. Their orthodoxy was tied to the acceptance or rejection of the material image in devotion. This course explores the many and varied definitions of what constitutes an image for the Byzantine East, the Latin West and Islam. We will engage with the phenomena of performative iconicity tied to the exhalation of breath in chant and the recitation of the Qur'an; the Eucharist as an image of God; and the concepts of the textual icons; figurative poems; and the magical power of script. The course will engage with the reading and analysis of primary sources and the close-looking of facsimiles of medieval manuscripts.

What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write "The Prince"? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly, and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these "universal geniuses" and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of "Renaissance man" known as polymathy. Taught in English.

Looking at textiles in the archaeological and visual record, this course will consider their materiality, fabrication processes, and circulation as part of embedded value in the Andes over hundreds of years. Course content will cover how Indigenous textiles in the Andes have long engaged questions of identity, subjecthood, representation, status, and knowledge production, as well as potentially legal and territorial considerations. We will give a good amount of attention to the Inka empire, the autochthonous power that dominated the area just before European invasion and how textiles and fiber technology was part of a rhetoric of power for the Inka state. During the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Inkas expanded along the western edge of South America, plotting their presence with administrative and production centers such as weaving workshops. Textiles were critical to how the Inkas visualized their power and reach, with very specialized, elite cloth serving as emblems of the state.

Focus is on early modern machines as tools for experience and action. In their break with Freudian psychoanalysis, French theorists Deleuze and Guattari speak of the machine as a tool of desire and attraction itself as "machinic" rather than desire for something that is missing. The goal of this course is to equip students with a different way of thinking by exploring a large group of objects from the early modern world (poems, buildings, costumes, maps, nets, and clouds) that help us to approach the period in a new way.

The devastation of 1945 marked not only the end of a war but the collapse of entire ways of seeing, thinking, and creating. From the ruins emerged a generation of artists, writers, and thinkers who wrestled with a world that had been fundamentally altered. How could one depict reality after the World Wars? How could painting move forward after the obliteration of tradition? What forms could literature take when language itself had been shaken? This course explores how photography, painting, and literature responded to the rupture of war and genocide, forging new artistic and intellectual languages in the face of crisis. We will study the stark, haunting images of postwar photography that capture both destruction and resilience; the radical experiments of painters who abandoned inherited forms to create new modes of expression; and the philosophical and literary works that questioned the very foundations of meaning, while also gesturing toward new beginnings. Through these encounters, we will consider how art and thought in the postwar era navigated between despair and renewal, bearing witness to catastrophe while insisting on the necessity of creation.