Global Renaissance

Catalog description

What does it mean to make Renaissance art history global? This interdisciplinary seminar will study the masterpieces and material culture produced during Europe's first sustained overseas contact with the rest of the world in the early modern period (16th-18th centuries). Looking closely at the new categories and new geographies of objects fostered by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British maritime trade routes, this course will reconsider traditional approaches to art history and weigh the new methods and revisions these curious images suggest. Objects will be studied from the perspectives of how they conceptualized "world," how histories of exploration and collecting intersected, how personal and communal identities were manufactured, and how political diplomacy and subversion impacted them and in turn were affected. Serious attention will be devoted to honing the craft of researching and writing a major research paper, step by step, in preparation for a capstone thesis in the humanities.