FA 51A the Early Renaissance in Italy

FA 45b Art of the Early Renaissance in Italy

Block J: TF 12:30pm - 1:50pm Mandel G-10 Professor Jonathan Unglaub

Mandel Humanities Center 211. x6-2665

Office Hours: T 2:30 – 4:30 pm; and by appointment

Overview:

This course offers an introduction to the arts in Italy during the Late Medieval and Early Renaissance periods, the 14th and 15th centuries, or what the Italians call the Trecento and the Quattrocento. The emphasis, however, will be on the latter century. This period witnessed amazing strides in the conception of architectural design, sculptural form, and pictorial space and drama. There was also an unprecedented elevation in the status of the artists themselves. The revived interest in the culture and artifacts of antiquity guided all of these developments, as did a renewed curiosity about the natural world. This understanding of past achievements, this newly developed sense of history, lead to the recognition of the dignity of the individual and one’s own creative power. Antiquity provided a template to measure contemporary achievements. Such comparison encouraged the formulation of art criticism and art theory. The value of the individual also brought about unprecedented reflection on the nature of secular society and the ideal of good government. In several princely Courts, sovereigns employed conspicuous patronage of art and learning to broadcast their stature and sophistication. Yet this renewed appreciation of the individual, society, nature, and the ancient past in no way diminished the dominance of the Church over people’s lives. The patronage of the artworks in this course will show how essential visual form was to expressing the ideologies of the individual, Church, and society.

We will cover the major artists from Cimabue in the late 13th century to Bellini at the turn of the 16th century. The course considers developments in architecture, urbanism, sculpture, and, above all, painting. Giotto, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Mantegna, and Bellini will receive in-depth consideration. The primary focus will be Florence, but projects and artists based in Venice, Rome, Siena, Urbino, Padua and Mantua will also be discussed. The course is a slide lecture, but given its relatively small size, every effort will be made to generate discussion. You should feel welcome to ask questions at any point during my presentations.

Four-Credit Course (with three hours of class-time per week)

Success in this 4 credit hour course is based on the expectation that students will spend a minimum of 9 hours of study time per week on average in preparation for class (readings, papers, discussion sections, preparation for exams, etc.).

Readings:

The course will meet twice a week for lectures. For each meeting, readings have been selected to stimulate discussion. It is essential that you do the readings before the class for which they are listed and come to class prepared to grapple with them. The readings include two course texts:

Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole, Italian Renaissance Art, volume 1, New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 2012. Available at the bookstore.
Vasari, Giorgio, The Lives of the Artists, transl. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford, 1991). Selections from Vasari are posted on LATTE.

Additional Readings on LATTE:

Additional, more in depth, readings are assigned for each week, are posted on LATTE under the readings module, listed in the order they appear on the syllabus. These should be read carefully, and reflectively, since they have been selected to stimulate class discussion.

Study Guides and LATTE site:

Study guides will be distributed concurrent with the presentation of material in class. These will list the images, terms, and basic data you are required to know for the midterm and final exams. They will be posted on the course LATTE site, along with paper assignments and the syllabus.

Images and ARTSTOR:

Images correlated to the Study guides will be posted under a separate module on LATTE. These files will be ARTSTOR “off-line image viewer” (OIV) presentations. To open and view these files you will have to download the free OIV software. Instructions are posted on LATTE.

Assignments / Museum Visits:

Boston boasts world-renowned collections of late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italian Art. Taking advantage of these rich local resources, an essential component of the course will entail the direct study of works of art. Two of the written assignments will focus on original objects in local museums. The first, due October 2nd, will ask you to analyze a group of late Medieval and early Renaissance works in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in relation to works and themes discussed in class (5pp). Near the end of the term, another assignment will ask you to evaluate major works in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by artists we have covered in class, and will involve some very basic research (6-7 pp). Both collections are accessible via the Brandeis-Boston shuttle on Thursday and Friday (MFA only) evenings, Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

A major exhibition of Renaissance Art, “Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice,”at the Gardner Museum, will close in the first weeks of the course. I would like to arrange an optional visit on the evening of Thursday, January 21 – Crivelli’s works, apart from their visual splendor and complexity, offer a primer on Christian themes in art. Another Thursday evening Museum visit will be planned in April to look at 15th-century artworks at the MFA, and then move onto Gardner, where you will have time to study works for the assignment.

In addition to the MFA and Gardner assignments, there will be a 6 page report, where you will analyze a group of readings that offer diverging interpretations of Donatello’s famous bronze David, one of the most fascinating, sensual, and enigmatic works of the period.

Exams:

There will be an in-class midterm exam and a final during the exam period. The format will include slide identifications with short-answer questions and longer essays based on slide comparisons.

Grade Calculation:

15% MFA assignment, due Tuesday, February 23rd, 5:00 pm
20% Midterm Exam, Friday, March4th
20% Donatello Readings Report, due in class, Tuesday, March 29th
20% Gardner Museum assignment, due Thursday April 21st
25% Final Exam (tentative), Wednesday, May 11, 1:30-4:30 pm

Attendance:

After 2 unexcused absences, 2 points will be deducted from final grade average for each additional absence. An attendance sheet will be circulated at the start of each class.

If you are a student who needs academic accommodations because of a documented disability you should contact me, and present your letter of accommodation as soon as possible. If you have questions about documenting a disability or requesting academic accommodations you should contact Assistant Dean Beth Rodgers Kayin Undergraduate Affairs at 6-3470. Letters of accommodations should be presented at the start of the semester to ensure provision of accommodations. Accommodations cannot be granted retroactively.

Learning Goals:

Visual literacy: be able to analyze works of art based on their formal elements such as space, line, color, light/ dark, and composition.
Visual rhetoric: understand how works of art were conceived and designed to tell stories and convey messages, through expression, dramatic action, allegory, and/or symbolism.
Understand the historical progression of painting during the period; and the conventions and innovations that mark different genres such as devotional imagery, historical narrative, portraiture and landscape.
Understand the social, religious, and political contexts that give rise to major works of art in Italy between 1300 and 1500.
Be able to write compellingly about works of art, analyzing their formal and rhetorical properties.
Be able to draw insightfully on the scholarship of the period in short essays and in a research paper.

Schedule of Classes:

Week of January 11th

F: Course Overview; Urban and Social conditions of Florence circa 1300

Hartt, Frederick and David Wilkinson, “Tusan Duecento Art,” in History of Italian Renaissance Art, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2011), 65-71.

Week of January 18th

T: Heritage of Rome and Byzantium: Art and Spirituality in Later Medieval Tuscany

Campbell and Cole, 42-45.

Hartt, Frederick and David Wilkinson, “Tusan Duecento Art,” in History of Italian Renaissance Art, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2011),45-64.
Vasari, 3-14.

F: Giotto: Devotional imagery, Florence, and Assisi

Campbell and Cole, 26-29, 34-6.
Vasari, 15-36
Harrison, Charles, “Giotto and the Rise of Painting,” in Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art, Society, and Religion 1280-1400 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1995), 1:73-96.

Week of January 25th

T: Giotto: The Arena Chapel in Padua

Campbell and Cole, 29-33.
Derbes, Anne and Mark Sandona, “Barren Metal and the Fruitful Womb: The Program of Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua,” Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 274-91

F: The Civic Art of Siena

Campbell and Cole, 20-24, 36-42.
Norman, Diana, “‘Love Justice, You Who Judge the Earth’: The Paintings of the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena,” in Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art, Society, and Religion 1280-1400 (New Haven, 1995), 145-67.

Week of February 1st

T:The Black Death and its Aftermath

Campbell and Cole, 45-47.
John Paoletti and Gary Radke, “Pisa and Florence: Social Upheaval,” in Art in Renaissance Italy, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2102), 153-73
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, “Second Commentary,” in Italian Art 1400-1500: Sources and Documents, ed. and transl. Creighton E. Gilbert (Evanston, 1992), 75-80.
Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G.H. McWilliam (New York: Penguin, 1970), 49-62.

F: Brunelleschi and Florentine Architecture

Campbell and Cole, 51-58, 87, 94-97.
Vasari, 110-146.
Frommel, Christoph, “Brunelleschi,” in The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 13-25.

Week of February 8th

T: Baptistery Doors and Orsanmichele: Rivalry and Sculptural Innovation

Campbell and Cole, 58-67.
Vasari, 84-93.
Lorenzo Ghiberti, Antonio Manetti, and Richard Krautheimer, in Hyman, Isabelle, ed., “The Contest for the Baptistery Door,” in Brunelleschi in Perspective (Engelwood Cliffs, 1974), 38-59.

F: The Drama of the Figure: Early Donatello, Ghiberti and Jacopo della Quercia

Campbell and Cole, 72-82, 98-100.
Vasari, 59-65, 147-54.
Turner, A. Richard, “Speaking Statues,” in Renaissance Florence: The Invention of a New Art (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1997), 51-67.

Week of February 15th Winterbreak

Week of February 22nd

T: Masaccio and the Revolution in Pictorial Space

Campbell and Cole, 83-4, 92-3, 101-103.
Vasari, “Preface to Part II,” 47-58, 101-109.
Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 1972), 29-40, 109-28.
Hartt, Frederick and David Wilkinson, “The Brancacci Chapel,” in History of Italian Renaissance Art, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2011), 208-220.

MFA assignment due by 5:00 pm on Tuesday, February 23rd

F: Alberti, Masaccio, and Pictorial Narrative

Campbell and Cole, 94-7, 107-9.
Alberti, Leon Battista, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, (New York: Penguin, 1991), 34-96.

Week of February 29th

T: Fra Angelico: Visualizing Devotion

Campbell and Cole, 134-40, 180-82.
Vasari, 169-77.
Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 1972), 40-56, 147-51.
Hood, William, “Fra Angelico at San Marco: Art and the Liturgy of a Cloistered Life,” in Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse, 1990), 108-131.

F:Midterm Exam, Friday, March 4th

Week of March 7th

T: Filippo Lippi: Sacred Beauty, Profane Life

Campbell and Cole, 140-43.
Vasari, 191-200.
Steinberg, Leo, and Edgerton, Samuel, “‘How shall this be?’: Reflections on Filippo Lippi's Annunciation in London,” Artibus et historiae VIII/16 (1987): 25-53.

F: Albertian Style, Dynastic Propaganda and Artistic Self-Consciousness: The Gates of Paradise and the Medici Palace

Campbell and Cole, 99-100, 104, 148-50, 225-29.
Vasari, 93-100.
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, “Second Commentary,” in Italian Art 1400-1500: Sources and Documents, ed. and transl. Creighton E. Gilbert (Evanston, 1992), 86-88.
Hale, J.R., Florence and the Medici (London, 1977): 9-42.

Week of March 14th

T:Florentine Art at Mid-Century: Uccello, Veneziano, Castagno

Campbell and Cole, 117-23,143-46.
Vasari, 74-83, 201-209.
Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 1972), 139-147.
Hayum, Andrée, “A Renaissance Audience Considered: The Nuns at S. Apollonia and Castagno’s Last Supper,” Art Bulletin 88 (2006): 243-266.

F: Alberti and Later Renaissance Architecture

Campbell and Cole, 179-80, 186-89, 194-201, 222-5.
Vasari, 178-84.
Grafton, Anthony, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Renaissance (New York, 2000), 315-330.

Week of March 21st

T: Piero della Francesca

Campbell and Cole, 229-31, 236-9.
Vasari, 163-8.
Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, Piero della Francesca (London: Phaidon, 2002), Chapter 3 “Surface and Distance: Piero’s Treatment of Pictorial Space,” 81-112.

F: No Class March Recess

Week of March 28th

T: Icons of Power, Desire, and Liberty: Donatello’s David and Judith

Campbell and Cole, 150-52.

Baskins, Cristelle, “Donatello’s Bronze David: Grillanda, Goliath, Groom?” Studies in Iconology 15 (1993): 113-134.
McHam, Sarah Blake, “Donatello’s Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence,” Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 32-47.
Randolph, Adrian, from “Homosocial Desire and Donatello’s Bronze David,” in Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, 2002), 160-92.
Williams, Robert, “‘Virtus Perficitur’: On the Meaning of Donatello’s Bronze David,”Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz 53 (2009), 217-228.

Report on these readings due in class, Tuesday, March 29th

F:Later works by Donatello and his Contemporaries in Sculpture

Campbell and Cole, 123-5, 146-8, 163-5, 193-4.
Vasari, 155-62.

Week of April 4th

T: The Arts of Florence in the Age of Lorenzo the Magnificent

Campbell and Cole, 246-7, 260-262, 271-3, 291-2.
Vasari, 210-223, 232-41.
Hale, J.R., Florence and the Medici (London, 1977), 43-75.

F: Botticelli and Re-inventing Pagan Myth

Campbell and Cole, 252-4.
Vasari, 224-231.
Politian, Le stanze per la Giostra del Magnifico Giuliano de’Medici, trans. David Quint (University Park, 1993), selections.
Panofsky, Erwin, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, (Uppsala, 1960), 191-200.
Dempsey, Charles, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the

Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton, 1992), 20-49.

Week of April 11th

T: Papal Art under Sixtus IV and Spiritual Crisis at the Half Millennium

Campbell and Cole, 273-80, 295-311.
Vasari, 256-273.
Savonarola, Girolamo, “Fra Girolamo Savonarola warns Florentines against the Dangers of the

New Type of Painting,” in Renaissance Art Reconsidered: An Anthology of PrimarySources, eds. C. Richardson, K. Woods, Michael Franklin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 311-14.

F: Mantegna: Humanist Art in Northern Italy

Campbell and Cole, 191-93, 219-22.
Vasari, 242-49.
Santi, Giovanni, “Cronaca rimata,” in Italian Art 1400-1500: Sources and Documents, ed. and transl. Creighton E. Gilbert (Evanston, 1992), 94-100.
Christiansen, Keith, Mantegna: Padua and Mantua (New York, Braziller, 1994)

Week of April 11th

T: The Courtly Arts of Ferrara and Mantua, and the Provinces

Campbell and Cole, 204-211, 258-9, 287-91.
Campbell, Stephen J., “Mantegna’s Parnassus: Reading, Collecting and the Studiolo,” in Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd, eds. Revaluing Renaissance Art (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000), 69-88.

F:Oil Painting and Luminescence in Renaissance Venice: Bellini and Antonello

Campbell and Cole, 239-44.
Hills, Paul, “Giovanni Bellini’s Light and the Rise of the Picture,” in Venetian Colour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 155-171.

Week of April 18

T: Bellini and Carpaccio: Venetian Landscape and Narrative

Campbell and Cole, 244, 292-4.
Lugli, Emanuele, “Between Form and Representation: The Frick Saint Francis,” Art History 32 (2009): 21-51.

Th (Brandeis F): Portraiture in the Renaissance: Discourses of the Gaze

Campbell and Cole, 155-8, 250-52, 254-5.
Simons, Patricia, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” in N. Broude and M. Garrard, eds., The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York, 1992), 38-57.
Rubin, Partricia, “Understanding Renaissance Portraiture,” in The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New Haven, 2012), 2-25.

Thursday, April 21st, Gardner Museum assignment due.

Final Exam (tentative): Wednesday, May 11, 1:30-4:30 pm