Facts and Fallacies in Renaissance Art
ARHA 330
Fall 2016 not offered
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This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on the ways in which partial, invented, and misunderstood historical, religious, and scientific facts became triggers for the production of Italian Renaissance art. From Pierio Valeriano's fanciful emblematic interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphs that fueled the Renaissance Egyptomania in the visual arts, to representations of Moses with horns by artists such as Michelangelo (a mistranslation of the Hebrew "tongs of fire"), to Ulisse Aldrovandi's illustrations of dragons and other mythological creatures and their discussion in scientific terms, Renaissance artifacts served as important sources of new facts they represented and legitimized. Organized around carefully articulated weekly themes and buttressed by the reading of both primary sources and recent scholarly literature, this seminar will introduce students to the fact-bending and fact-producing dimensions of Italian Renaissance art, giving them tools to research actual objects (for example, the 1602 edition of Valeriano's HIEROGLYPHICA in the Wesleyan Special Collections or relevant prints from the Davison collection) for their final projects. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ART |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
Major Readings:
1) Leonard Barkan, UNEARTHING THE PAST: ARCHAEOLOGY AND AESTHETICS IN THE MAKING OF RANAISSANCE CULTURE (ISBN: 978-0300089110)
2) Benvenuto Cellini, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENVENUTO CELLINI (ISBN: 978-0140447187)
3) Brian Curran, THE EGYPTIAN RENAISSANCE: THE AFTERLIFE OF ANCIENT EGYPT IN EARLY MODERN ITALY (ISBN: 978-0226128931)
4) Paula Findlen, POSSESSING NATURE: MUSEUMS, COLLECTING, AND SCIENTIFIC CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN ITALY (ISBN: 978-0520205086)
6) Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, ANACHRONIC RENAISSANCE (ISBN: 978-1935408024)
Selection of articles and primary sources on e-reserves.
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Examinations and Assignments:
Regular contributions to seminar discussion (including reading reports), two oral presentations of the research topic, a 20-25 page research paper |
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