ART HISTORY (ARH)

How long have humans been creating art? What makes the Mona Lisa the Mona Lisa? Why is Picasso so famous? This course answers such questions by surveying the development of art in the West from prehistoric times to the present day. Through illustrated lectures and in-class discussion we will consider what purposes art serves, why it changes, and how artistic change is linked to political and social developments. At the same time, close study of individual works will introduce the skills needed to identify works of art and decode the imagery they contain.

Art history trains a person in looking closely at an image. The cognitive skills gained from art history – observing and describing art objects – easily lend themselves to the health care arena and the helping professions by enhancing the ability to communicate and interpret. Astute observation is particularly important for health care professionals because it aids in physical examinations, diagnoses, and empathetic responses. This course is the traditional art history survey reinvented with special attention to students who plan to go into a career in health care or the helping professions.

This course, exclusive to the Rome campus, examines the history and society of Rome and its architectural and artistic expression as it developed over a period of 3000 years. Students study key examples of architecture, monuments and art from Classical Rome through to the Renaissance and Baroque, and the modern period. Much of the course is taught on site with visits to churches, palaces and museums.

This course surveys the history of Western Art from the Greek world to the present day, using the question of beauty as a unifying theme. The first class each week will introduce the art or architecture of the period; the second will use readings from period sources to understand how beauty was perceived and defined in that period. The course will have a particular emphasis on theories of beauty that recur in successive historical periods: beauty and mathematics, beauty and function, beauty and color, beauty and mimesis, beauty and effect.

This course looks at one of the most celebrated eras of art history, the Renaissance. Focusing on Italy and Northern Europe, the course will look at art made from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Material covered will include painting, sculpture, architecture, and fresco, from the devotional works of the Franciscans to the courtly art made for the Duke of Urbino, and works made for women as well as men. Looking critically at primary source material, such as the writings of Alberti and Vasari, the course will also consider the role of the artist and what is often seen as his rise in status, through examples like Botticelli, Michelangelo, Giotto and Dürer.

Typically offered on the Rome campus, this course examines the emergence of Baroque art in the late Cinquecento and early Seicento (16th and 17th centuries) and follows the development of the Baroque style in sculpture, painting and architecture.
During the class students study artists including Caravaggio, Bernini and Borromini. Much of the course is taught on-site in Rome, the ‘cradle’ of the Baroque.

This course examines the art of Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, starting with the Neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David and ending with Impressionism and its impact on the art world. Topics covered will include the invention of photography and its effect on painting; the development of landscape painting in Germany, France and the United States, and the growth of the art market. French art will be the main focus of the course, but we will also be thinking about Francisco Goya in Spain, Romanticism in Germany, the Hudson River School in America, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England.

This course examines the development of modern art in Europe and the United States, focusing on the period between 1880 and 1950. Starting with Post-Impressionism, we trace the key movements in modern art (including Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism), and consider some of the more traditional forms against which they defined themselves. In the process, we seek to understand how the terms ‘modern,’ ‘modernist,’ and ‘avant-garde’ came to be applied to art and artists, and to establish what art historians and cultural critics mean when they use them.

The course examines the art produced between the end of World War II and the present day. Since the art of this period uses an extraordinary range of materials and approaches, many of them far outside the traditional practices of European art-making, we also try to answer some important questions: What does it mean to be an artist? What conditions must an object or event fulfill to qualify as a work of art? Are these artists even serious? You will emerge not just with an understanding of movements in art since the middle of the last century, but also with an awareness of the dramatic ways in which the entire concept of art has changed in the last 70 years.

Each of these numbers designates a specific level of specialized study on a relevant topic that has been designed by the student in conjunction with a faculty member.

This upper level, field-based course is designed for juniors and seniors to explore and develop professional opportunities and apply concepts and skills learned in their coursework in art history.

From the early 1400s to the late 1600s, the cities of the Low Countries (now Belgium and Holland) were the most exciting urban centers of Northern Europe. Bruges in the fifteenth century, Antwerp in the sixteenth, and Amsterdam in the seventeenth laid the foundations of modern capitalism and produced some of the most dazzling art of any period. This course examines how politics and religion shaped the Low Countries in this period of extraordinary growth, which produced artists of the caliber of Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Vermeer, Judith Leyster, and Rembrandt van Rijn. The Worcester Art Museum has a superb collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Northern European art, so we will visit multiple times during the semester.

This course combines a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with an examination of the book’s impact on the development of modern art. Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes how the prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Overman is his successor. In a series of encounters and conversations, Zarathustra expounds and refines his philosophical system, concluding that he himself is the Overman. In the course of his poetic parable, Nietzsche skewers the materialism and mediocrity of late-nineteenth century European society, and proposes that only the creative individual can blaze a path to a better future. Modern artists, out of sympathy with a world that rarely appreciated their work and fed by Romantic notions of the artist as a force for change in society, latched onto Nietzsche’s ideas with passionate enthusiasm, molding them into an image of the avant-garde artist as world-changer.

Special Topics courses in art history are offered occasionally. They respond to special interests evinced by students or the research interests of the faculty.