An introduction to art and architecture from Antiquity to the late Middle Ages, including non-Western traditions. The course gives an overview of key monuments and works of art from diverse historical periods, regions, and cultures and introduces students to the basic interpretative tools of art historical research as well as to the history of the discipline.

Explores the conceptual character of medieval European art from late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages with an emphasis on methodological, historiographical, and theoretical issues. Using selected monuments and objects from a wide geographical range and dating from the 4th to the 14th centuries as case studies, students will familiarize with the methodological developments of art historical research. The course will particularly focus on the "anthropological turn" of medieval art history and medieval image theory.

Lectures will examine the birth, rise and flowering of Italian Renaissance art in Tuscany, Rome and Venice from about 1250 to 1600 A.D., with emphasis on the 15th and 16th centuries. Artists and works of art will be presented, whenever possible and relevant, within their cultural, political, social, technological and/or economic circumstances. Among the major artists to be studied: Giotto, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian.

A broad study of European painting and sculpture from the French revolution to 1900 with special attention to art's relationship to social, economic and cultural changes. Lectures will explore a range of themes including art and revolution, the rise of landscape, shifting conceptions of realism, and the birth of "modernism" and the avant-garde. Emphasis on major figures including David, Canova, Goya, Ingres, Turner, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Degas, Rodin, Van Gogh and Cézanne.

A critical study of the major movements, paradigms, and documents of modernist art from the Post-Impressionism to the "Degenerate" art show. Among our topics: primitivism, abstraction, collage, the readymade, machine aesthetics, photographic reproduction, the art of the insane, artists in political revolution, anti-modernism. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

ART 217 surveys the arts of Japan from the pre-historic period through the present day. Painting, sculpture, and architecture form the core of study, though we will also examine the critical role of other forms, including calligraphy, lacquer, and ceramics. Throughout the course we will take close account of the broader cultural and historical contexts in which art was made. Our topics include the ongoing tension in Japanese art between the foreign and the indigenous, the role of ritual in Japan's visual arts, the re-uses of the past, the changing loci of patronage, and the formats and materials of Japanese art.

This course introduces the history of art in China through focused studies of major media taken in roughly chronological order. First come the chief art forms of ancient China: bronze ritual vessels, jade, lacquer, and silk. A turning point in their slow eclipse by representational art is the famous Qin terracotta army (210 BC). A little later a foreign religion, Indian Buddhism, came to China, bringing new forms of devotional art; we look at sculpture and cave temples from the 6th to the 9th century. The rest of the semester will be devoted mainly to painting and calligraphy, but porcelain, architecture, and gardens will also be mentioned.

This course explores the art and archaeology of Mesoamerica, including the cultures and regions of the Olmec, West Mexico, Teotihuacan, Oaxaca, Maya, and Aztec. From temple pyramids and carved stone monuments located in plaza centers to the broken ceramic sherds and stone tools found in household trash deposits, material culture comprises one of the basic resources archaeologists examine to understand past ways of life. The course will explore the inferences scholars make in the analysis of material remains as well as the ways in which material culture was integral to the making of ancient political, economic, religious, and social systems.

Survey of the transformations in Greek art beginning with the decline of the Classical period (fifth century BCE) and continuing through the period of Alexander the Great's unification of the Mediterranean world, up to and including the Roman conquest of the east. Emphasis on sculpture, painting, and mosaic.

The main goal of this course is to acquaint students with the major architectural monuments of ancient and post-classical Rome, paying particular attention to creative transformations of form and meaning. The urban development of the city will be stressed and used to provide a contextual reading of individual buildings and public spaces.

Process and Performance - This seminar will examine artistic practice in the twentieth century according to the strategies of process and performance, paying special attention to the techniques and materials employed and the aesthetic and political implications of those choices. The course will draw on literature from art history and criticism, philosophy, and media and gender theory to investigate a selection of moments in modern art from Mondrian to the present. How does a focus on performance and process alter our understanding of the history of modernism, and what are its implications today?

Thematic studies in Chinese film (Republic, People's Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong), 1930s to the present with emphasis on recent years, viewed in relation to traditional and modern Chinese visual arts and literature, colonialism and globalism, Communist politics, gender and family values, ethnicity and regionalism, melodrama and the avant-garde, the cinematic market, artistic censorship, and other social issues.

Seminar addresses significance of works of art, and of practices of writing about visual art, in the work of three great writers of German in the early 20th-century: poet Rainer Maria Rilke; founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud; and philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. Emphasis on close reading and critical analysis. Readings drawn from variety of fields and genres, including: lyric poetry, experimental prose, psychoanalytic theory, cultural analysis, aesthetic theory, criticism. Topics include: situation of work of art in modernity; art and the unconscious; the work of art and the historical transmission of culture in modern Europe.

This course surveys the development of modern art and artistic media, architecture, painting, sculpture, and photography in the Islamic world from the late 19th century to the present. It aims at providing a background on dominant artistic traditions in the Middle East after 1900 as well as an evaluation of how traditional aesthetics changed and were re-negotiated under the influence of Western culture. The course explores, for instance, the persistence and reemergence of traditional arts such as calligraphy as an expression of national artistic identity within this region.

An introduction to a range of art-historical approaches and to the writings of key figures in the history of the discipline. Attention is also given to research and writing skills specific to the history of art.

An introduction to a range of art-historical approaches and to the writings of key figures in the history of the discipline. Attention is also given to research and writing skills specific to the history of art..

War in Greek Art - This seminar examines the art and archaeology of warfare in ancient Greece, from the Late Archaic through the Hellenistic periods. Topics include: the memory of war; the depiction of violence; portraiture and the cult of personality; propaganda; and responses to destruction. We will look closely at painting, sculpture, monuments, weapons and armor, and archaeological sites as we try to understand how changes in the material culture relate to historical and political developments, artistic trends, and/or shifting conceptions of conflict.

A course about Chinese concepts of nature and human nature, theories and traditions of landscape art. Weekly consideration of such themes as replicating and transforming the landscape; submission to/control of nature; landscape as political allegory; pilgrimage and exile; gardens and artists' studios; landscape magic in ancient China; endangered pandas, power dams, and the technology of modern art.

Pilgrimage, Topography of Sacred Art: This seminar will examine the art and architecture associated with pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Near East, North Africa and Europe from early Christian times to the thirteenth century. It will examine the role played by the visual arts in the development of saints' and relic cults, as well as economic and social aspects of pilgrimage. Original textual sources, such as pilgrims' narratives, guidebooks, maps and miracle collections, will allow students to experience the phenomenon of pilgrimage through contemporary accounts that complement the art historical material.

Examines the global exchange in art and architecture between and among the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the period 1492-1800. The course focuses on the geographical, historical, religious, anthropological, and aesthetic aspects of issues such as cultural encounters, diffusion, transculturation, regionalism, and related topics.

The focus of the seminar will be G.B. Piranesi (1720-1778), as architect, antiquarian, polemicist, dealer, and graphic artist. We will endeavor to see Piranesi in context, to understand his accomplishment against the background of his adopted city and the learned culture that flourished there. Piranesi's publications are well represented in Princeton collections, providing opportunities for those who wish to work closely with original sources.

This seminar covers the emergence of Art Deco in Paris between the wars and its connection to the visual arts, architecture, film, and fashion. We will analyze the ways in which its sophisticated forms and materials responded to new conditions of urban living, the mobility of modern life through speed and travel, the rise of the film industry as a mass medium, and the appearance of women as producers of decorative art. Special emphasis will be given to the multiple and conflicting concepts of the modern object in an age that both embraced and rejected mass production.

The literature of art, architecture and archaeology in Europe until the late eighteenth century. Some sessions to be devoted to the Islamic World and East Asia. Later intrepretations, consequences, and relevance to other cultures will be considered.

Seminar on the long-standing problems concerning the tradition of Greek sculpture, most of which survives in later Roman copies. Emphasis on stylistic comparison of the surviving copies (Kopienkritik); critical engagement with the ancient written sources that attest the most famous works (Opera Nobilia); the historiographic and critical tradition in modern scholarship devoted to these works; and, in particular, those works in the PAM and the MMA that may serve as prime examples of the phenomenon.

Examination of the ideas of time and temporality in the Renaissance image, via the lens of two early modern obsessions and their history: the representation of movement and the idea of the copy. Focus will be on artists and works from the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. Topics include: procession, print technology, replicas, pilgrimage, archaeology, the workshop, and more. Course includes at least one trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Seminar explores roles works of art play in Rainer Maria Rilke's writings and their reception. Key case studies of Rodin and Cézanne, with additional readings on their work by philosophers and art historians whose approaches speak to concerns of Rilke's own. Conceptualization and representation of works of art and aesthetic experience in relation to other things, and significance of painting, sculpture, and other media, artistic and nonartistic, in Rilke's work. Investigation of signal instances and central issues in the history of modernism in the visual arts and literature.

The seminar examines the diverse arts employed in pre-modern chanoyu, the Japanese tea ceremony, including ceramics, paintings, lacquer, calligraphy, and architecture. Special attention is given to period texts written about tea objects. Among the topics considered are the physical and conceptual adaptations of objects (both indigenous and non-Japanese) for the tea context, the aesthetic terms tea practitioners created for chanoyu objects, the practice of bestowing names on objects, and the ensemble use of objects of different mediums. Seminar members may also, if they wish, study objects outside Japanese tea as comparative examples.

Object, Building, Body: Visual Culture in 1920s Paris -This seminar will explore a particular moment in the French visual arts, when architects, painters, photographers and film-makers articulated new and often conflicting concepts of the object, architecture, and the body. It will range from Le Corbusier and Ozenfant to Léger and Man Ray, the machine aesthetic, the Ballets Russes, and the avant-garde appropriation of film. How did these artists respond - or not - to sweeping social and political changes, such as transformations in gender roles, the colonization of Algeria, and the emergence of negritude?