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161 - 170 of 234 results for: ARTHIST

ARTHIST 407B: The Art of Travel: Medieval Journeys to the Unknown (ARTHIST 207B)

In many ways, the reasons that medieval people traveled are not unlike our own: to see new sights, make new connections, and return home to regale others with their exploits. Of course, travel was also a more complicated affair, limited to those who could afford the time and money to leave home. Focusing on three famous medieval travelers the pilgrim Egeria, the businessman Benjamin of Tudela, and the invented traveler John Mandeville this course will explore the visual and cultural landscape of global travel in the premodern age.
Last offered: Autumn 2021

ARTHIST 407D: Race and Ethnicity in Premodern Europe (ARTHIST 207D, HISTORY 215B, HISTORY 315B)

How do historians, art historians, and literary historians of premodern Europe shape their research and their teaching around questions of race? How do current debates on race theory shape our perception of the past and deepen historical inquiry? This graduate colloquium focuses on the most recent publications on race in medieval and early modern studies to reflect on such questions while examining the challenges that race studies put on historical definitions, research methodologies, as well as teaching institutions.
Last offered: Winter 2021

ARTHIST 407E: Sacred Play: The Material Culture of Christian Festivals (ARTHIST 207E)

The twentieth-century American poet and esotericist Robert Duncan once called for a return of the medieval calendar, citing its many feast days as an antidote to the modern 'weekend.' Indeed, the medieval Christian calendar was built on festivals, multimedia affairs that took place both within and outside of the purview of the Roman Catholic church, involving visual art, theatrical performances, and religious devotion. Festivals also played a vital role in the spread of Roman Catholicism across the world, especially in colonial contexts, where these spectacular events reveal tensions between colonizers and indigenous populations. This seminar examines the material culture of Catholic festivals from antiquity to the present, exploring how these elaborate events created spaces of both conformity and resistance.
Last offered: Winter 2022

ARTHIST 408: Hagia Sophia (ARTHIST 208, CLASSICS 173, CLASSICS 273)

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.
Last offered: Winter 2022

ARTHIST 408A: Abject Subjects and Divine Anamorphosis in Byzantine Art (ARTHIST 208A, CLASSICS 119, CLASSICS 319)

Entering the space of the church immediately interpellated the medieval subject, transforming him/her into an abject self, marred by sin. This psychological effect of pricking the conscience was enhanced by the architectural panopticon channeled through the icon of Christ the Judge in the dome confronting the faithful. The texts recited and chanted during the liturgy further helped streamline the process of interpellation: these homilies and chants were structured as a dialogue implicating the sinful self. This course will explore the ecclesiastical space as a divine anamorphosis, an image of God that envelops the subject, transforming him/her into the object of the divine gaze.
Last offered: Spring 2022

ARTHIST 408B: The Art of Medieval Spain: Muslims, Christians, Jews (ARTHIST 208B)

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.
Last offered: Spring 2023

ARTHIST 408D: Virginity and Power: The Mother of God and Visions of Empire (ARTHIST 208D)

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.
Last offered: Autumn 2022

ARTHIST 409: Theories of the Image: Byzantium, Islam and the Latin West (ARTHIST 209C, CLASSICS 158, CLASSICS 258, REES 409)

This seminar explores the role of images in the three major powers of the medieval Mediterranean: the Umayyads, the Carolingians, and the Byzantines. For each the definition of an image- sura, imago, or eikon respectively-became an important means of establishing religious identity and a fault-line between distinct cultural traditions. This course troubles the identification of image with figural representation and presents instead a performative paradigm where chant or recitation are treated as images. As such, students will be able to see the connections between medieval image theory and contemporary art practices such as installation.
Last offered: Spring 2021

ARTHIST 409A: Image, Icon, Idol: Theories and Practices in Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West

This course explores the phenomenon of iconoclasm, iconophobia, and aniconism as markers of a vast and profound cultural transformation of the Mediterranean in the period from the seventh to the ninth centuries. As the Arabs established the Umayyad caliphate in the seventh century, quickly conquering Holy Land, Egypt, and advancing all the way to Spain, they perpetrated an identity crisis in the region. By the seventh century three large political entities formed in the Mediterranean ¿ the Umayyads, the Carolingians, and the Byzantines ¿ each competed for legitimacy; all three emerged from the ashes of Late Antique culture, yet each tried to carve out an identity out of this common foundation. In this parting of the ways, the three cultures took among others the issue of what constituted an image and what role it played in devotion. Eik¿n, imago, ¿ura became the basis on which to built differences and accuse the other political players of idolatry.

ARTHIST 410: The Masters: Raphael

Five hundred years after Raphael mysteriously died (April 6, 1520), this seminar reflects on his contributions to the arts. Raphael's art is often defined as a negation of death. He painted eternal myths, unearthly saints, and timeless beauties. His sketches served as exemplars and the very paragon of drawing for hundreds of years. So much so that art historians have done little more than admire his art. How come Raphael has resisted criticism for half a millennium? What does his unremitting fame tell us about the state of art history? While studying eight of Raphael's masterpieces in depth, this course also reflects on the shortcomings and potentials of art history as a critical discipline. [Undergraduate enrollment with consent of one of the instructors].
Last offered: Spring 2020
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