Art and Archaeology

A study of the origins, nature, and impact of Greek contact with the Near East in the Iron Age. Course examines chronology; regional variation and distribution; technology and innovation; differences across media; modes of communication and exchange; patterns of consumption and display; and the social function of the "exotic." Analyzed with a view to changes and developments in settlement and society, particularly migration, colonization, social stratification, and the rise of the polis.

Ancient Egyptians, like all people, had multiple, intersecting aspects to their identity that were linked profoundly to their social communities. What kinds of objects, images, and material traditions linked ancient people together? What material forms acted as crucial modes of communication within communities and among them? We examine a wide range of material culture considering various sections of society, and we then look in-depth at several ancient sites to examine how these various groups intersected in shared spaces and across time.

This course examines the relationship between two forms of mapping the city: cinematic representations of urban space and architectural representations of urban form. It questions how shifts in urban form and plans for development or reconstruction give rise to cinematic representations. Required viewing of films every week in addition to required readings. Project on the general theme of mapping the city through cinema utilizing materials from films, urban texts, and readings.

Study of a topic involving both ancient Greece and ancient Rome, such as imperialism or slavery, from a comparative perspective.

Problems in art and architecture of the Eastern Roman Empire and culturally related areas from 300 to 1453.

Intensive seminar on selective topics in Medieval art and theory from 400 to 1400.

Heritage structures represent an important cultural legacy. First, this course identifies particularities relative to structural analysis of heritage structures; it correlates the space and time (where and when the structure was built, used, upgraded, damaged, repaired), with construction materials, techniques, and contemporary architectural forms. Second, the course presents the methods of structural analysis that take into account the identified particularities, that are efficient in finding solutions, and that are simple and intuitive in terms of application and interpretation.

Course addresses relationship between color and technology in the arts. It questions the proprieties of color materiality, nature of pigments and their usage. Quest for natural and synthetic colors emerging from laboratory research by alchemists and chemists. Hazardous scientific discoveries impacting the artistic field. Economic implications of color discovery and patenting. Color trends indicating social changes. Links between light and vision theory and applications in the arts. Recreation of artistic technology as a community self identification. Global exchange of color technology. Problems in conservation and display of colored objects.

The seminar examines in detail selected thematic topics in Italian painting and sculpture.

Seminar on selected topics in Italian art from 1300 to 1600, with special emphasis given to its social, religious, and cultural context. Problems of method in dealing with the contextual study of works of art are considered.

Art has a place as well as a time. This course examines the geography of art, primarily in the early modern era. Examples are chosen from Europe and the Americas. A theoretical, historiographic, and historical investigation of issues, including ethnic and national identity, metropoles, regionalism, provincialism, peripheries, and artistic interchange, is explored.

Advanced research in the history of architecture from 1400 to 1750. Topics vary, with the focus each year placed on important European centers and architects and on issues related to architectural theory and practice.

This seminar examines the illusionistic effects that Baroque sculptors of marble, bronze and clay employed to rival the deceptiveness of painting. By studying sculptural ensembles by Bernini and his contemporaries in contrast to the works of earlier sculptors like Michelangelo and against paintings in the tradition of Titian, we explore the value and limits of painterly models for making and viewing sculpture. Our investigation also considers the limits of comparisons to painting and studies the strategies sculptors adopted to undermine illusionism and to assert an autonomous sculptural paradigm.

An intensive study of intellectuals and nationalism in Latin America and the Caribbean; the Spanish American essay from Rodó to Paz; autobiography and first-person narrative, Martí; and the generation of 1880 in Argentina, the crónica modernista, poesía gauchesca.

This course focuses on European maps, globes, and architectural drawings and prints produced in the period before aerial cartography and puts into dialogue cartography and architecture by interrogating their respective solutions to figuring space. Students interrogate the ways these graphic objects render complex and invisible realities through a mix of natural and conventional signs. Most of the sessions take place in the Special Collections classroom in Firestone Library in front of historical maps, atlases, globes, books, and architectural drawings and prints.

This seminar proceeds through a series of thematic and case studies ranging from Britain's early colonial expansion to the legacies of empire in contemporary art and museum practice. Topics include science and ethnography; the colonial picturesque; curiosity and collecting; slavery and visual representation; art and nationalism and readings are drawn from a range of disciplines.

Course explores the dynamic interplay between painting, poetry, and fiction in 19th-century France and England. The focus is twofold: painters and paintings as protagonists in novels and short stories, and paintings inspired by literature. Themes include problems of narrative, translation, and illustration; changing theories of the relative strengths of painting and literature as artistic media; realism and the importance of descriptive detail; the representation of the artist as a social (or anti-social) actor; the representation of women as artists and models; and the artist's studio as a literary trope.

Study of a particular artist, subject, medium, or movement in American art, primarily in the 19th century and ordinarily organized around significant holdings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Possible topics include landscape and still-life painting, Homer and Eakins, and American drawings and watercolors.

Seminar will focus on a specific aspect of art, history, theory, and criticism in Europe between 1789 and 1913. Possible topics include art and revolution, nationalism and the arts, orientalism and primitivism, and theories of modernism.

The seminar focuses on the study of a particular problem in modernism. Possible topics include the advent of modernist abstraction, the different uses of advant-garde devices of collage and photomontage, the readymade and the construction, art and technology, art and the unconscious, art and political revolution, and antimodernism.

The seminar is concerned with the work of a single European or American photographer or with a significant movement in the 20th century.

Suzhou as a cultural site is the key to many broad and complicated issues regarding how art was produced and practiced in Ming-Qing China. These complexities include artistic regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the codification and edification of literati culture, the urbanization and commoditization of art, and the interrelationship of the global and the local. This seminar aims to examine Suzhou as the nexus that interweaves all of these essential threads of the Ming-Qing artworld and as the lens through which we understand this artworld as multi-faceted and multi-layered.

The course focuses on the intellectual stock of the field of Chinese painting. It offers an opportunity to rethink the topics and issues that important studies in the field have addressed. The goal of the seminar is to guide the Ph.D. students on how to tackle these topics and issues raised by previous scholarship.

This seminar teaches PhD students how to develop research topics and exhibition themes from their first hand experiences with actual art objects. It makes extensive use of PUAM's excellent collection of Chinese art, which includes diverse genres and categories of paintings that span more than one thousand years. The course also incorporates new scholarly trends that tackle how to interact with art objects and contemplate their visuality and materiality.

Museum seminar in the Japanese field, including problems in the connoisseurship of paintings, calligraphies, sculptures, and other categories of art objects.