Fall 2009

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

Art and Architecture of the Eastern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, from ca. 600 to ca. 1500. The course will focus on the art of the Byzantine empire and its capital, Constantinople, but will also consider its broader sphere of cultural influence (Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Sicily, Venice, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumania). The course will examine the major factors which shaped the artistic legacy of Eastern Christendom during the Middle Ages.

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.

ART 215 surveys the history of Chinese art from Neolithic to Han, concentrating on recent archaeological discoveries and on the problems of interpreting archaeological finds. It also examines several themes in detail: metal technology and its beginnings; the interaction between design and technique in bronze casting and jade working; and the origin of Chinese civilization and of a distinctively Chinese tradition. All these topics invite comparisons between China and the ancient Near East.

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.

A survey of the architecture and the arts of various Islamic cultures between northern Africa and the Indian subcontinent from its beginnings in the 7th to the 20th century. Emphasis will be on major monuments of religious and secular architecture, architectural decoration, calligraphy and painting. Background in Islam or Middle Eastern languages is not a prerequisite.

A survey of photography from its multiple inventions in the early nineteenth century to its omnipresence (and possible obsolescence) in the twenty-first. Themes will include photography's power to define the "real;" its emulation and eventual transformation of the traditional fine arts; and its role in the construction of personal and collective memories. Precepts will meet in the Photographic Study Room of the Princeton Art Museum to study original images.

Behind the awe-inspiring monuments, the complex religious cults, and the intimations of wealth and a taste for the good life found in the surviving remnants of ancient Egypt lie real people concerned with spirituality, economics, politics, the arts, and the pleasures and pains of daily life. In this course, we will examine the art and architecture created in the ancient Egyptian landscape over 4 millennia, as well as the work of archaeologists in the field, including up-to-the-minute finds from on-going excavations.

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.

European architecture from 1420 to the mid-18th century with particular emphasis on its historical and social background. Various architectural styles - Renaissance, baroque, and rococo - are studied in terms of important architects and buildings especially of Italy, France, and England.

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.

An introduction to the history of art in the United States from the colonial period to 1900. Works of art will be examined in terms of their cultural, social, intellectual, and historical contexts. Students will consider artistic practices as they intersect with other fields, including science and literature. Topics include the visual culture of natural history, fashioning the self, race and representation, landscape and nation, art and the Civil War, gender politics, art and medicine, and realism and deception.

In this course we will examine ancient Egyptian art and architecture (primarily from the pharaonic period, c. 3000 BCE to c. 1000 BCE) using the body as a visual and conceptual theme. Utilizing art historical and archaeological methods, we will analyze sculpture, relief, painting, drawing, and architecture, as well as objects used to adorn and encase bodies both living and dead, emphasizing the context and interrelationships of these materials as they relate to the body and the corporeality of Egyptian society and culture.

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.

The patrons of Chinese painting and many of its leading artists were politicians by profession, both royal and commoner-bureaucrats, and much of their art was designed to fulfill political functions: propaganda, moral self-cultivation, self-advertisement and self-consolation, expressions of support, resistance, and resignation. Much of this material is covert and subversive and requires a deep cultural reading. Half of the course covers premodern China, half covers the 20th-century.

The seminar will investigate the culture of ancient and medieval Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, strategically situated in its center. Sicily has always been a crossroads-meeting place of different peoples, religions, and cultures. Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Normans successively inhabited it from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The seminar will explore cultural developments in Sicily during the time span from ca. 600 BCE to 1200 CE, focusing on artistic, architectural, and general cultural trends observable in the broader Mediterranean context, while emphasizing idiosyncratic aspects of the island.

This course examines art between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the economic crisis of 2008. Among our topics are the place of historical memory in contemporary practice, the problem of art in an experience economy, artists concerned with the environment, the questions of political art and public art, the recent predominance of the art market, and the new possibility of a "recessional aesthetics". Among the strategies are the performative body, the found object, the mixed-media assemblage, the projected image, and the archival installation. There will also be artist lectures and studio, gallery, and museum visits.

A study of the radical forms of urban renewal that altered the city of Paris during the heyday of Impressionism, including the violent redistribution of social classes across the urban territory, the creation of new forms of infrastructure, and the transformation of the city into spectacle. Urban mobility, modern patterns of leisure and consumption, as well as spatial segregation and class antagonisms helped pave the way for new cultures and counter-cultures, as traditional class and gender roles changed.

This course explores the rich artistic and architectural legacy of the Mediterranean islands of Rhodes and Malta from classical antiquity through the 20th century, including the Byzantine, Ottoman and Italian colonial periods. Our particular focus will be the artistic patronage of the military order of the Knights of St. John, including urban planning, fortifications, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the art of Caravaggio. Following a trip to Athens and Rhodes during fall recess, students will participate in the construction of an inter-active website mapping the island and its monuments.

A course designed to inform students in the theoretical foundations of the discipline as well as in the methodological innovations of the last few decades.

THE ROMAN PORTRAIT- A seminar devoted to the historical and aesthetic development of this fundamental Roman sculptural form and its ability to signal both individuality and social roles. Special emphasis will be given to autopsy (visits to Princeton and Metropolitan Museum collections).

Course discusses iconographical and theoretical preconditions for the development of a particularly challenging body of medieval images that range from the visions of Old Testament prophets, to John's Apocalypse, dreams, and visionary experiences in the context of female monasticism (Hildegard von Bingen, Gertrud von Helfta). Issues covered in this course are: patristic and medieval theories of vision, devotional practices, gender, and the scientific approach towards vision in the later Middle Ages.

The course will be framed around a series of polarities, through which we explore the ways in which apparent opposites were reconciled in the architectural setting of medieval and Renaissance Venice. These will include: Republic and Empire; Church and State; East and West; Gothic and Classical; Military and Civil; Sound and Space; Architect and Proto; Tradition and Reform; Town and Country; Nobles and Citizens; Utopia and Reality. The architecture will be studied as a context for human activity, with special attention to its response to the amphibious site and its ideological meanings.

This seminar will focus on the work of a single artist, Édouard Manet, often considered the originator of modernist painting. Because of this privileged status he has been written about repeatedly and from a broad range of methodological perspectives, from Marxist to psychoanalytic, formalist to feminist, and beyond. This seminar will investigate those different approaches and their relationship to each other, as well as think about their adequacy and inadequacy to the art they try to understand. Repeated and close looking at Manet’s paintings will be at the heart of the seminar. Students should be available for class trips to see the Manets in New York and Washington, DC.

Appropriation - of style, iconography, and actual objects - contributed substantially to shaping the arts of Japan. Japanese artists borrowed from China and Korea, from the West, and from within Japan itself. Whether the thing borrowed was a mode of depiction or an object, the appropriation was an active engagement with the source and a response to it that involved conceptual transformation. A range of examples will be studied, including ink painting, chanoyu (tea ceremony), and Floating World prints, exploring appropriation as impediment or stimulus to innovation, assertion of cultural dominance, and mediation of the past.