Renaissance to Modern Art

Catalog description

This course is a broad survey of the most important artists and developments in Western art from the early 14th century to the present, including architecture, sculpture and painting. In addition to being a survey of major monuments in art, the course is also intended as an introduction to the field of art history: to its studies of artistic style, iconography (the study of subject matter and its meaning), patronage and contextual history. Art history not only studies the formal elements of art, like the use of color and line, but also analyzes the historical circumstances (social, political, economic) that surround the production of art, and it questions the meaning of works of art for viewers of the time and for later generations. Around 1310, an artist known as Giotto painted several major series of frescoes (mural painting done on wet plaster) in which we see the beginnings of a modern Western notion of composition, dramatic narrative, and the illusion of perspective. We will look at the refinements of these elements of art through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when artists we now call avant-garde-notably Cézanne but also predecessors such as Courbet and Manet, and successors such as Picasso and Matisse-presented serious challenges to these fundamental elements of painting. We will look at the extraordinary art produced between the time of Giotto and Cézanne, as well as the consequences of the modernist challenge to art, including 20th-century abstract painting and conceptual art.