Time Schedule:
Stuart P Lingo
ART H 400
Seattle Campus
Courses on special topics, frequently by visiting faculty, which cannot be offered on a continuing basis. Consult art history office for subjects offered.
Class description
AUTUMN 2006 "The Corpus of Renaissance art. The Ideal body and Representation, 1400-1600" The historiography of Italian Renaissance art has often presented the “rebirth” of ancient Greco-Roman culture – one of the defining features of the period – as an achievement that created an ideal canon of art which would remain dominant and even uncontested until modernity. At the center of the Renaissance attempt to revive ancient artistic culture, however, was a ng experiment that continues to be taken for granted: that is, either overlooked or assumed to be unproblematic. This experiment was the radical attempt to make the human body – and particularly the ideal body – the center of artistic style and meaning. Such an endeavor could never be unproblematic in post-antique Western culture; indeed, the Renaissance enterprise was contested from its very inception. In this course we will investigate the history of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century efforts to foreground the representation of the ideal body, and consider their unsettling effects on period culture.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
lecture/discussion
Recommended preparation
writing/critical thinking ability; some background in art history
Class assignments and grading
research paper
quality of research and interpretive thought; active participation in class discussion.
