Art and Empire: Aztec, Inca and Spanish

Catalog description

This course is a comparative study of the artistic production used in Aztec, Inca and Spanish empires. ART H 460 Art and Empire: Aztec, Inca and Spanish (3) (IL)(BA) This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. This course compares the diverse visual culture of the pre-Columbian world's two most powerful empires, the Aztec and Inca, to ascertain how art, architecture and public ritual functioned as tools of hegemony. In the aftermath of the Spanish physical and "spiritual" conquests of the sixteenth century, colonists continued to exploit the central role played by Aztec and Inca imagery as a means to assert and maintain colonial control, co-opting preexisting channels of training and also imposing foreign sign systems. This course queries, how did the visual arts effectively communicate competing imperial ideologies, how was art production appropriated as a site of indigenous resistance, and how do these artifacts continue to construct communal identities, both past and present?