Art History

This is a special studies course involving an internship with a corporate, public, governmental, or private organization, arranged with the Study Center Liaison Officer. Specific internships vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. A substantial paper or series of reports is required. Units vary depending on the contact hours and method of assessment. The internship may be taken during one or more terms but the units cannot exceed a total of 12.0 for the year.

Rome has played a pivotal role in the construction of a global scale culture. It first contributed to unifying the ancient world system as the capital of an empire. Then, in the early modern period (parallel to the age of explorations and colonialism), it became a laboratory for interactions between the local and the global. This course focuses on these interactions roughly between 1550 and 1750, the so-called Counter Reformation and Baroque Age.  Although this is mainly an on-site art history course, each art work, building, or urban plan is studied as a document to understand broader concepts related to geography, politics, religion, science, and philosophy. To assess the value of early modern art and architecture students develop multidisciplinary skills to investigate the multilayered meanings of objects, buildings, and urbanism. Focusing first on Caravaggio, then on the rivalry between Bernini and Borromini, and finally on the Renovatio Urbis (the new avenues connecting the main churches of the city), this course simultaneously explores the micro and the macro context of every commission. From the private fashioning of papal families (Borghese, Barberini, Pamphili, and Chigi) to the impression of orbialization (the concept that pervades the papal blessing addressed to the city and to the world), the city promised to be a topographical space of universal salvation. From the different approaches to art and architecture by Bernini and Borromini (theatrical and philosophical respectively) to the impact of the interreligious encounters of the new religious orders, Rome appeared as the laboratory of a globalization actualized in tandem with the colonial powers of Portugal, France, and Spain. The Spanish Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus in 1540 in Rome, shifted the religious discourse toward the universal good setting the program for a possible global society. The Jesuit system with their missionary and educational activities throughout the world was the most important institution for “interactions”. No wonder that in the 17th century, the Roman main educational institutions (Studium Urbis, Collegio Romano, Propaganda Fide) focused on the study of languages and the publication of dictionaries and grammar books. The impact of the Jesuit father Athanasius Kircher over 17th century Rome is as polyhedric as his writings. Kircher created one of the biggest cabinets of curiosities (wunderkammer) of Europe. His collection of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiques, embalmed animals, botanical rarities, scientific instruments, and a myriad of objects coming from China, India, Mexico, etc. was referred to as theatrum mundi (the theatre of the world), a metaphoric representation of the culture of the early modern city. By the end of the 17th century, Rome simultaneously assumed the connotations of new Jerusalem, Athens, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Babel mirroring the world as if in a theatre of memory and geography while other cities in different continents took the name of Rome of the East or Rome of the West through a religious and architectural response. The visual arts reveal the global resonance of Rome but also the presence of different ethnic groups in the city. The Eternal City was, undoubtedly, one of the loci where the subjective dimension of globalization originated.  

This course explores art and politics in France from the revolution to the present. Through a multimedia approach including sculptures, paintings, prints, commemorative monuments, architecture, street art, and photographs, it retraces the changing forms that some of the most salient political messages have taken in modern French art. The course follows a chronological progression from Revolution to Empire, followed by the rise and fall of the Second Empire and the resulting thirst for revenge. It then broaches the 20th century, including the politics of the avant-garde, the art of colonialism, and the varied aesthetic responses to the rise of totalitarianism on display at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris and evident in the art of collaboration and resistance produced in Occupied and Vichy France during the Second World War. The art of 1960s countercultural contestation (anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, feminist, etc.) is then studied, before examining recent initiatives in the realm of commemorative art and cultural display that approach issues facing contemporary French society today, such as terrorism and constructively confronting its colonial legacy. The instructional format consists of both lectures and group site visits to museums and monuments throughout the city.

Students research a self-chosen topic and develop an extended research essay under the direct tutelage of an appointed mentor. Students engage in conversation with teachers who are experts in the subject being studied. These tutorials allow students to develop their own ideas under the direct supervision of a tutor.

The course provides a complete picture of museum science, and covers various themes related to current domestic and foreign museum circles. Course topics include the philosophy and practice of the international museum circle, including museum history, mission and purpose, etc.; the status quo, problems and prospects of the development of Chinese museum circles; planning and production of museum exhibitions; planning and implementation of museum education activities; development and operation of museum cultural products and services; and museum construction and management. The course includes museum visits.

This course explores the place of food in art in France, with a focus on the modern and contemporary periods. Throughout the course, representations of food are studied as a means to survey the evolution of French art within a global context, and as significant markers of social, ethnic, and cultural identity. The analysis of these depictions provides the opportunity to learn about dietary and dining customs, habits, and beliefs prevalent in France from the early modern period to the present. The course begins by decoding the archetypal representations of succulent food in the still life and genre painting of 16th-17th-century Holland, which established the conventions of the genre for centuries to come. It then examines how the rise of these previously minor artistic genres in 18th-century France coincided with the birth of French gastronomy. Frivolous depictions of aristocrats wining, dining, and indulging in exotic beverages like coffee and hot chocolate then give way in post-Revolutionary France to visions of austerity and “real life,” featuring potato-eating peasants. The focus then shifts to representations of food and dining in the age of modernity, when Paris was the undisputed capital of art, luxury, haute cuisine, and innovation. The course analyzes how Impressionist picnics and café scenes transgress social and artistic codes. Building on their momentum, Paul Cézanne launches an aesthetic revolution with an apple. Paul Gauguin’s depictions of mangos and guavas speak to his quest for new, “exotic” sources of inspiration, and allow discussion of questions of race, gender, and French colonialist discourse. Drawing from these pictorial and social innovations, the course subsequently observes the place of food and dining themes in the avant-garde movements of early 20th-century Paris, whose defiance of conventional society and art leads them to transform previously comforting themes into troubling ones.  It questions the place of food—or its absence—in art to capture the suffering and violence of upheavals like the Second World War and consider the place of food and dining in contemporary art: from the Pop Art movement’s calling into question postwar consumer society through its representations of mass-produced food; to contemporary creators in a plural and globalized art scene who use these traditional themes to challenge the status and roles of the artist, the spectator, and the work of art itself; to how depictions of food in visual art grapple with multiculturalism in France today.