Instructor: David Kidger
Course Time: TR 5:30-7:17 pm
General Education: Art & Writing Intensive
Term: Winter 2014


DESCRIPTION:

The notion of the Renaissance as an artistic movement remains problematic for general historians, as well as historians of architecture, the arts, music, sculpture, and philosophy. This course examines and critiques the notion of the Renaissance as exemplified through the artistic life of a number of churches, cities and courts in northern Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this period there was a patchwork of city states, republics, dukedoms and other principalities in what we now consider northern Italy. We consider how this puzzle contributed to artistic life, both sacred and secular, and how different modes of artistic expression developed as a result of these political and social systems. The course will make extensive use of internet and other multimedia resources to enhance the learning environment. Through a set of case studies of different types of artistic expression, students will discover how artists interacted with their patrons and their public audience, and how their work influenced contemporary life and thought. Finally, as a brief coda, students will examine how we view all of this in the 21st century, and what we can learn about the arts today from our study.

SELECTED READINGS:

Primary Sources

• Pietro Bembo, The History of Venice (1551).
• Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1527).
• Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (1532).
• Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550).

Secondary Sources

• Gene A. Brucker, Renaissance Florence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).
• Gene A. Brucker ed., The Society of Renaissance Florence: A Documentary Study (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
• Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in ItalyThe Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Penguin, 2004).
• Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
• Patricia Fortini Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice (New York: Abrams, 1994).
• Loren Partridge, Art of Renaissance Florence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009).
• David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).