Art History

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course focuses on interpretative views applied to premodern art history in thought-provoking/groundbreaking exhibitions and catalogues. Students thus familiarize themselves with the major perspectives and challenging topics that have engaged curators and specialists in the last decades, dealing with a sensitive plurality of contexts and cultural geographies. Through discussions and case studies, students can prove different critical paths, going beyond stylistic influence and center/periphery paradigms through artistic circulation to connected and rhizomatic histories. The course considers how ideologies, authoritative canons, racialization/stigmatization, imperialism, and colonialism have been the core forces behind collecting, trade, and the acknowledgment of aesthetic value, as well as museums’ storytelling and catalogs narratives.

The course explores the Mediterranean Renaissance and Global Renaissance/Baroque art by offering insights into intertwining key thematic issues: Global Catholicism, propaganda, power strategies, transformation of models, distributed agency, artistic migration, borderlands/disconnected paths, constellations/networks, wars anxiety, climate crisis, religious changes, political sovereignty, moral authority, and social emotions. Through the study of specific exhibitions, catalogues, and seminal essays/research projects, the course reframes curatorial practices, considering paintings but also prints, early modern illustrated books, devotional objects, maps, folding screens, and other pivotal materials in Europe and the Americas.

Students learn to interpret premodern and early modern art between the 14th and 18th centuries using methodological tools that question the "Global Renaissance." Beyond Eurocentric approaches, the course focuses on the challenges and applications of methods, theories, and concepts, connecting art histories through global perspectives and addressing cultural transformations and diverse historiographical approaches in curatorial practices.

This course examines some of the wealth of artistic production in the Netherlands in the 17th century. The course is based around the study of Rembrandt and Vermeer as contrasting and complementary figures who represent some of the diverse tendencies of the time. This entails the study of the development of individual styles and subject matter ranging from history painting to portraiture, landscape, and genre painting. The distinct artistic character associated with centers of production, even ones that were geographically close, is assessed with an emphasis on Amsterdam, Delft, and Utrecht. The final block of the course looks at the posthumous reputations of Rembrandt and Vermeer, examining questions of attribution, authenticity, canonicity, and rediscovery. 

In the last two decades, an increasing number of artists have engaged the specters of colonialism that continue to haunt us in our postcolonial present. In their work, the archive often figures as source or resource, matter or metaphor, and presence or absence of the colonial past. Considering the intensity of this archival return, it is no exaggeration to state that the archive has emerged as a paradigm through which artists pursue engagements with colonial histories. In their work the archive enables them to confront the legacies of their colonial pasts and provides them with possibilities to conceptualize the hidden histories and counter-memories that have been suppressed by screen memories whose traumatic contents need to be addressed to open up alternative futures. Conventionally imagined as a technology for the storage of traces of the past, in this context the archive may be thought of as a site to rethink the past, present, and future. This seminar examines how work in the archive explores alternative relations between past, present and future. This is done by examining a range of practices adopted by scholars, archivists, social activists, and contemporary artists in their engagement with the archive. This includes themes like; how colonial archives have been neglected, destroyed, and replaced by decolonial archives; how photographers have embraced archival images as material to recycle and repurpose; how contemporary artists have developed alternative archival epistemologies; how restitution might be conceived as a form of archival memory work; and why, in the post-apartheid context in South Africa, the decolonization of the university has been conceived as a question of the archive. In sum, the seminar examines how the archival turn addresses the question of African futures.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. 

The student is expected to learn the frameworks of visual art produced by artists from the last decades and living today. In this perspective, contemporary art responds to a global system that is culturally diverse, multifaced, and technologically advanced. This ample focus wants to evidence critical methods for the comprehension of various contemporary art styles, through developing a deep understanding of their historical background. At the end of the course, the student is able to apply methodologies for analyzing works of art and examine the contemporary art scenario.

This course is an exploration of contemporary visual art forms and their international cultural connections for the student with little experience in the visual arts and history of contemporary art. It includes a brief study of art history of the last three decades, and in-depth studies of the elements, media, and methods used in creative thought and processes. The course takes into the latest visual expanded scenarios in which visual art is engaged with sociological and anthropological practices of now. The course underlines the many possibilities of our postmodern and post-contemporary actuality inside and outside the museum. This course defines the meaning of aesthetics and its relationship to cultural conventions, describes specific processes used by visual artists, art as a social activity and a singular creative act, historical forms of artistic training.

This course develops in three fundamental moments. The first unit (10 hours) introduces a theoretical deepening in order to identify the Contemporary Art History. The second unit (10 hours) is dedicated to deepening of some contents of contemporary art. The third unit (10 hours) is an immersive experience into different artistic spaces (galleries, museum, art association, temporary art practices), including the city, where it’s possible now to meet contemporary art.