THE GOLDEN AGE OF EUROPEAN PAINTING RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE

Course Objectives:

KHAS 1420 has myriad objectives. First, it aims to introduce students to meaningful content that will stimulate and widen their intellectual horizon and foster skill development. The latter includes language acquisition (English), as well as the dynamics of intellectual inquiry and academic process – research, observation, discussion and debate, the production of hypotheses, reading, writing, collaboration, and public presentation. Secondly, and more specific to the course content, would be the acquisition of a critical vocabulary for the analysis of art, a familiarity with the systematic analysis of visual art, a command of the corpus of paintings and artists of this period and their interaction, an appreciation of broader cultural and historical dynamics behind and inside art as such, and the ability to extrapolate experience from this period/course to the world of visual media today.

Course Content:

The course surveys European painting during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This covers the span from about 1350 -1750. It also covers the geographic area, beginning in Italy, to include the Low Countries, Germany, France, Spain and England. The course readings are diverse, but will rely upon three authors in particular: Vasari, “The Lives of the Painters”, Gombrich, “The Story of Art”, and Woelfflin, “Renaissance and Baroque” as well as “Principles of Art History”. The lecture/discussions will be conducted Socratically and focus on individual painters (arranged chronologically and geographically) as the most basic organizational principle of the course. Course sessions will be centered around PowerPoint displays of the major artworks by individual artists in order to provide some idea of the oeuvre and style of each and to serve as the arena of student observation and in-class discussion.