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COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS
FALL
2008
RSCP. 72100 - Introduction to Renaissance Studies:Early
Modern Print & its Detractors: Author & Artist, Publisher &
Reader GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3/4 credits, Prof. Elsky, [93066]
Cross listed with ENGL 81100, C L 80900 & ART 85000
This
course will examine the possibilities that the mechanically reproducible word
and image brought to the production of the literary, visual, and intellectual
arts and their delivery to an audience. Readings will be drawn from history,
literature, and art history.
We will begin by considering the various ways print technology affected the
dissemination of ideas and information in early modern culture. We will then
turn to the impact of print on literature and art in relation to competing
forms of publication (painting, manuscript, and performance).
Topics will include the relation between painting and the reproducible print,
and the professionalization of the printmaker as artist in Italy and Northern
Europe; the rivalry between print publication and manuscript circulation of
verse and prose; the relation between print and performance versions of
drama; the development of the professional authorial persona and the
resistance to authorial status; the place of women writers in networks of
publication; the deployment of varied means of publication to negotiate
position with family, coteries, and patrons.
The course will end by considering the combination of text and image in the
illustrated publication of news of the conquest of the New World.
Topics will be examined in relation to specific writers and artists,
including Mantegna, Dürer, Diana Mantuana, Petrarch, Erasmus, Montaigne,
Labé, Shakespeare, Donne, Wroth, and Cortés.
Because this is a cross-disciplinary course, participants are encouraged to
make use of material from their home discipline.
Assignments will include an oral report and a semester project.
ART. 85010-Vasari: Artist/Historiographer GC: M,
4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Richter, [93259] Course open to Art
History students only. Permission of Executive Officer required for all
others.
The
name Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) is known to all art historians. He is
the designer of the Uffizi, one of the most important museums in the world,
which contains at its nucleus the collection of masterpieces amassed by the
Medici family.
Vasari himself worked for Cosimo I, the first grand duke of Tuscany, serving
as his chief architect and decorator. The Palazzo Signoria is frescoed
by Vasari with scenes extolling the triumphs of this illustrious
dynasty. He established the famous Accademia del Disegno in 1563 which
would set the standard for formal art institutions for the next 350
years.
In addition, he was active as a painter and architect in his native Arezzo,
which in the cinquecento, was part of Florentine territory.
Vasari is also the author of Le vita de’ più eccellenti scultori, pittori, ed architetti, a work which
ultimately eclipsed all his other efforts and placed him in a special
pantheon of cultural heroes.
First published in 1550 and then reissued in amplified form in 1568, Vasari’s
Lives has become the standard reference work for the study of Italian
Renaissance Art. An important cultural as well as historical document,
it is considered by Italians to be on a par with the works of Dante and
Boccaccio.
Written by an artist for artists, his magnum opus has been both
praised and vilified over the centuries; its author described alternatively
as an excellent biographer or a witty and wicked and untrustworthy
fabricator.
His praise of disegno over colorito inspired the great
rivalries between Poussin and Rubens in the seventeenth century and between
Ingres and Delacroix in the nineteenth century. In order to
understand the true importance of the Lives, Vasari’s work must be compared to those of his contemporaries
such as Ludovico Dolce, Bellori and Karl van Mander.
This seminar will address all aspects of Vasari’s
career: his art and
historiography. Students should begin by reading his biography of
Michelangelo, an artist praised as the greatest of all times having not just
rivaled the ancient, but succeeding in surpassing them. Individual
lives will be evaluated as well his role as court artist and architect within
the cultural milieu of grand ducal Florence. Requirements: 30
minute seminar reports and a research paper. Four (4) auditors
permitted.
Preliminary
readings:
Vasari, Lives, 2 volumes, Penguin edition.
Vasari
on Technique, Dover paperback, 1960
ART. 85020 - Interaction Italian & Northern Renaissance
Art GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Lane, [93260] Course
open to Art History students only. Permission of Executive Officer required
for all others.
A
seminar dealing with the interchange of ideas north and south of the Alps
from 1300 to 1530 in painting, manuscript illumination, and printmaking.
Lectures will focus on the reception of northern European art in Florence, in
conjunction with the exhibition, "Florence and the Low Countries,"
to be held at the pitti Palace from June 20 to October 20.
Among the problems to be considered are Flemish painters and paintings in
Florence, Florentine patronage of Flemish painting, Flemish influences on painters
from Filippo Lippi to Raphael, the impact of Hugo van der Goes’
Portinari Altarpiece on Florentine painting of the late fifteenth century, Memling’s role in the development of Florentine portraiture and the
landscape
"alla fiamminga," and the theoretical basis for the appeal of
Flemish painting to Quattrocento painters and patrons in Florence.
Students may choose topics that focus on Italian influence on northern
painting, manuscript illumination, or printmaking as well as northern
European influence in Italy, such as the influence of Trecento painting and
sculpture on Jean pucelle, collections of Flemish paintings in Italy, Italian
painters who trained in Flanders, the impact of northern European prints in
Italy, Italian influences on Durer’s
paintings and prints, and Durer’s impact in Italy.
Students are expected to have a basic knowledge of both Italian and northern
Renaissance painting and graphics. Five (5) auditors allowed.
Preliminary Readings:
Christiansen, Keith. The View from Italy." In From Van Evck to
Bneael. Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Musçuin of Art
edited by Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith Christiansen, New York, 39—61.
Nuttall, Paula. From Flanders to Florence. The Impact of Netherlandish
Painting. 1400-1500. New Raven and London, 2004.
Rohlmann, Michael. "Flanders and Italy, Flanders and Florence. Early
Netherlandish Painting in Italy and its particular Influence on Florentine
Art: An Overview." In Italy and the Low Countries—Artistic Relations. The Fifteenth Century,
Proceedings of the Symposium held at Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, 14
March 1994, Florence, 1999, 39-67of the Sympos urn held at Museum Cathar neconvent,
Utrecht, 14 March 1994, Florence, 1999, 39—67.
C L. 80101 - Dante's Paradiso NYU: M, 3:30-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4
credits, Prof. Freccero, [93508]
Information: italian.dept@nyu.edu
C L. 80102 - Arts of Eloquence in Medieval & Renaissance
Italy NYU: W, 3:30-6:15 p.m., Rm.
TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Cox, [93509]
Recent
scholarship in medieval and early modern culture has increasingly stressed
the centrality of the study of rhetoric in these periods and the range of its
influence, not simply on literature but on everything from art, music, and
architecture to political thought.
This course serves as an introduction to medieval and early modern rhetoric
in Italy, conceived of broadly as a global art of persuasive discourse,
spanning both verbal and nonverbaluses. Information: italian.dept@nyu.edu
ENGL. 82100 - Representative Bodies Early Modern England GC: T,
4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Pollard, [93031]
This
course will examine how writers imagined and represented bodies in early
modern England.
Conceptually, bodies changed dramatically in the period: the longstanding
humoral model, inherited from the Greek physician Galen, was confronted with
challenges from Vesalian anatomy, Paracelsan pharmacy, Harvey's discovery of
the circulation of the blood, and new illnesses and medicines introduced by
international travel and trade. Amid all these changes, bodies on page and
stage were dissected, dismembered, drugged, displayed, disciplined, adorned,
painted, and ravished.
We will examine how different genres represent these and other bodily states,
with attention to the body's relationship to the mind, the emotions, the
environment, and literature itself. Readings will include tragedies
(including The Duchess
of Malfi, The Revenger's Tragedy, and Hamlet); comedies (including The Taming of the Shrew,
Bartholomew Fair, and Volpone);
and erotic epyllia (including Venus
and Adonis and The
Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image); as well as selections from
cookbooks and cosmetic manuals (such as Platt's
Delights for Ladies), antitheatrical polemics (including Gosson's
School of Abuses20
), medical texts (such as Crooke's Mikrocosmographia,
and Culpepper's A
Directory for Midwives), and conduct books (including Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman).
Assignments will include a presentation, occasional brief written responses,
and a final paper.
FREN. 83000 - The Making -- and Unmaking -- of Louis XIV
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Stanton, [93516] Course
taught in English.
Louis
XIV has not only defined the French seventeenth century (as Voltaire’s Le Si cle de Louis XIV suggests), he has become
synonymous with myths of French nationhood.
This course aims to examine various aspects of the making of Louis XIV first through
l7th century theories of kingship (including the king’s two
bodies), and his own memoirs.
We will
also analyze the vast system of representations and the cultural policies and
institutions his monarchy created to construct his image, including the
Académie Française and Versailles. After investigating his centralizing
cultural, national and imperial policies, we will consider the
(im)possibility of his absolutism: thus we will look both at elements of
disciplining and punishing, including censorship, exile, the Protestant
holocaust, and le grand renfermement of women, as well as the signs of
discursive and political opposition to his reign and absolutistic tendencies
(in treatises, memoirs and correspondences, the nouvelle historique and
satires of the king’s sexual impotence.
Finally, we will consider the ambiguities and contradictions of
representations of kingship during the reign of Louis XIV (in Corneille and
Racine).
The 17th-century
authors we will read include Bayle, Bodin, Bossuet,Bouhours, Corneille,
Félibien, Fénelon, La Fontaine, Louis XIV, Pascal, Perrault, Racine, Retz,
Saint-Simon, Scudéry, Sévigné and Villedieu.
The readings will be uploaded on e-reserve by August 15, except for the
following texts, which should be purchased: Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV and
Twenty Million Frenchmen (NY: Vintage, 1966); and editions with numbered
lines of Corneille, Pulchérie and Racine, Iphigénie
In
addition to close reading of the texts and class participation, work for the
seminar will feature a 20-page research paper (including a thesis statement
and an outline), and one class presentation. There will also be a final exam.
Please
address all questions to domna stanton (dstanton11212@aol.com)
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