ARTHIST 113: All is Fair... Love and War in Italian Renaissance Art

Course Description

How are love and war comparable? Why must the creative impulse be accompanied by a destructive one? What do we really mean when we say that an artist "executed" a painting or a photographer "shot" a scene? This course explores the agony and ecstasy involved in the making and viewing of art. We will look at artists like Titian, Michelangelo, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio to think about the processes, techniques, and materiality of artworks, their warring political and iconographic ideologies, and their afterlives of conservation and care. Our discussions will expose the porous boundaries between love and war, pleasure and pain, life and death, presence and absence, in order to complicate the glorified legacy of the Italian Renaissance.