Arts and Ideas

Catalog description

This course invilces a survey of the various arts - visual, literary, musical - in relation to movements that define and shape the arts in distinctive form or style at various times and various epochs. In relation to this, the course will examine the possible ways in which these movements are generated by ideas - aesthetic, metaphysical, but also scientific, political and ethical - that come to dominate a specific period. Movements and styles, to be explained, include the Classical Greece, Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, Florentine Renaissance, Roman Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Early Modernism, Abstract Expressionism and Postmodernism. In this way, students will begin to understand the creative arts as well as the ways in which the arts themselves help to form and transmit ideas. By exposing students to the ways in which ideas are central to the arts, students should be able to understand how the arts involve processes both of exploration and communication, so that the arts take their place rightfully at the center of the pursuit of rationality, and therefore at the center of what we call civilization.