Renaissance to the Present

Catalog description

This course is an introduction to the history of art in a global context from the early 1400s to the present. Lectures will introduce students to significant moments in artistic production in both the Western and Eastern hemispheres through focused studies on crucial ​aspects of exchange between cultures and continents. Covering an era of increasing economic ​transactions, ​imperial conquests, and industrialization, this course will build recursively through themes such as: the emergence of authorial identity and models of artistic collaboration, the ​traffic of artistic materials and techniques and their adaptation in different cultural settings, and the foregrounding of art to both document and initiate political change. Developing vocabularies to discuss painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints, ​as well as photography and film, students will learn to ​analyze art's decisive role during times of social transformation, including modernization, ​colonization, and technological advances​. ​We will also examine the role of broad-reaching ​media and the advent of art criticism in forming public opinion. Assignments will encourage students to think widely across geographies and study intimately local examples in the Philadelphia museums.