- Early Renaissance Art and Architecture

Catalog description

This course is an introduction to the visual culture, architecture, and selected patterns of urban development in Italy during the Early Renaissance and the Quattrocento. Focus will be on developments in Siena, Rome, and especially Florence. Issues surrounding 'classicism' and the development of new representational systems, new scales and materials in sculpture, new spatial and structural forms in architecture, and new relations to urbanism and centers of power and global expansion will be explored. Of particular interest are dynamics of difference and identity such as political pressures after the Black Death, patriarchy in family and church, women's resistance, and European slavery before 1492.