ARH.1016 Great Renaissance Masters: Art and Culture of Renaissance Italy
This course explores the dynamic cultural, artistic, and social transformations that defined Italy during the Renaissance period (14th-16th centuries), with a particular focus on how art and culture both reflected and shaped ideas about power, identity, and social hierarchy. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the course will incorporate a variety of sources-visual, textual, and historical-to emphasize how artistic production during the Renaissance was deeply intertwined with broader societal concerns including religion, politics and power, individual identity, gender, and to a degree, race. Students will engage with primary sources, from artworks to treatises, and participate in discussions focused on how Renaissance art and culture continue to shape modern ideas about artistic achievement, social class and patronage, as well as the status of the artist. Students will explore the ways in which art served both as a vehicle for individual expression and as a tool for reinforcing the social, economic, and political structures of the time through analysis of the artistic output of major figures such as Giotto, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, alongside the role played by powerful patrons such as the Medici family and the Duke of Milan, the Popes and other church leaders, as well as emerging secular elites. Students will also be asked to consider how Renaissance art both shaped and was shaped by contemporary gender norms. Discussions will center not only on the representation of women in art, but also on the importance of women as patrons and artists.