Art History

The course covers architectural appreciation, architectural criticism, and creative thinking in architectural design. By interpreting the development history of ancient and modern Chinese and foreign architectural and environmental landscape aesthetic creation, and important achievements and creative thinking of designers in architectural creation, the course cultivates students' independent thinking ability and creative thinking, and opens up creative imagination and enlightenment.

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course provides a historical overview of the major figures of Italian Renaissance architecture from 1400 to 1600—including Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante, Raphael, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Michelangelo, Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, Sanmicheli, Sansovino, and Palladio, as well as an outlook on a selection of European Renaissance architects. The architects are analyzed within the cities or countries they operated and are compared with the cultural, social, and political local context. The second part of the course is an overview on a selection of European courts and on the role of humanistic architecture at the dawn of colonialism. Issues such as local antiquities, revival and survival, rules and license, theory of architecture, drawings, and graphic conventions are addressed throughout the course.

This course examines the link between history and music. Opera, which was born and developed in Italy, went through the Golden Age of Opera when it became the major entertainment for Italian aristocracy. The course closely examines elements that Opera consists of: orchestra, conductor, state, lighting etc., and compares western opera based on Belcanto method with oriental traditional arts. 

This course introduces the essential principles of art history, and presents a chronological study of the main artistic manifestations of the Western World from prehistory to the Middle Ages. Special attention is paid to the classical antiquity and the Romanesque and Gothic medieval styles.

Community art involves all arts disciplines and can be found in all corners of the world: in immigrant working-class areas, in prisons, in rural communities, in (former) war zones, etc. In the Netherlands, for example, it is a rapidly expanding field that operates mostly, but not exclusively, outside of the mainstream or avant-garde. Because it challenges traditional notions of (autonomous) artmaking, community art reconfigures existing art theory and criticism in an attempt to validate itself both socially and culturally. This course provides a critical introduction to the practical and theoretical dimensions of community arts. As small, multilingual research teams, students conduct fieldwork in ongoing community arts projects in Utrecht or elsewhere in the Netherlands, film their results, and present this video to the class.