Exploring Medieval Florence: Art, Architecture, and People

Catalog description

This course will assess the Art and Architecture of the city of Florence in light of the history of the people who inhabited it during the Middle Ages. By discussing and analysing a diverse set of multimedia evidence, including visual arts, material culture artefacts, and the city's built environment, the course will sketch the multiple historical identities of the many Florentine citizens who commissioned, conceived, and experienced them from the fifth to the middle of the fourteenth century. Lay and religious men and women - notable and less notable ones -, intellectuals, artists, artisans, traders, and diplomats will be mapped through works of art displayed in major art collections in the city or integrated in some of its most prominent buildings. The course aims to develop a better understanding of Florence, a city with a complex cultural heritage, stratified by many historical processes from the transformation and Christianisation of the late-antique Roman city of Florentia to the establishment of Florence as one of the most important self-governing comune of the Italian peninsula, from the explosion of global trade to the Black Death and the early stages of Italian humanism.