Courses

Marguerite Yourcenar’s famed fictional Memoirs of Hadrian serves as the starting point for an exploration of Hadrian and the art he commissioned in Rome and abroad. Hadrian’s passion for life, quest after peace, romantic wanderlust, veneration of Greek culture, and craving for love, along with his acceptance of death’s inexorableness, led him to commission some of Rome’s greatest monuments. The emperor’s flair for leadership and talent as an amateur architect inform student projects on the sculpture, mosaics, and buildings of the age, among them the portraiture of Hadrian’s lover Antinous, the Pantheon, and Hadrian’s Wall in Britain. Special attention is paid to the Pantheon and to Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, an empire unto itself where Hadrian’s autobiography was fully realized.

Qualified undergraduates who have taken Roman Art: Empire, Identity, and Society and/or Roman Architecture may be admitted with permission of the instructor.

Works by three scholars who established the field of eighteenth-century French art—Norman Bryson’s Word and Image, Thomas Crow’s Painters and Public Life, and Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality—form the core of this course, supplemented with primary texts by Diderot, Coypel, the Comte de Caylus, and others. We also read recent scholarship by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Mary Sheriff, and Melissa Hyde, who have taken a broadly feminist or psychoanalytic approach to the material. Within this critical framework we examine Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, Greuze, and David, and also key concepts such as Versailles and order, the Rococo style in painting and its relationship to decorative arts and architecture, the importance of sculpture, the popularity of chinoiserie, and the body under duress in the art of the Napoleonic empire. Particular attention is paid to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readings of key works and how these jibe with contemporary debates about color, facture, sensuality, and the status of various genres of French painting. One trip to New York to the Morgan Library, Frick Collection, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Prerequisite: working knowledge of French.

This seminar focuses on painting, sculpture, drawing, and art theory in Florence between 1300 and 1550. This may seem like a redundant topic, considering the fact that Renaissance Florence is probably the best-studied city in all of art history—a city privileged as a topic of study ever since the days of Vasari. Current models of writing about early modern art prefer a more global approach. This seminar explores the possibility that something can be gained by closely studying one place at one specific historical moment, if only because it raises questions about the definition and usefulness of “historical context.” It is the aim of this seminar to study Florentine art and art theory in relation to developments in contemporary Florentine politics, Renaissance historiography, and humanism.

Chinese painting from the masters of the late Ming period to the individualist and orthodox masters of the early Qing dynasty. Issues of art based on either art or nature. Attention to paintings from the period in the Yale University Art Gallery collection.

Ways in which traditional genres and alternative film forms establish or subvert convention and expectation and express thematic and ideological concerns. The balancing of narrative containment and excess, as well as action and image. Use of body and voice, space and music. Examples include films by Antonioni, Zhang, Ozu, and Hitchcock.

Prerequisite: FILM 150.

Modern African American artistic production explored in the context of American art and social history. Critical race theory and artistic discourse from the Spiral group in 1963, to the Black Arts Movement and the culture wars, to current readings in American and postblack art. The complicated relations between African American art and politics. Use of art objects from the Yale University Art Gallery.

Survey of American art, from colonization and revolution to the emergence of modernism at the turn of the twentieth century. The role of art and visual culture in shaping American history. Focus on works from Yale University Art Gallery collections; artists include John Trumbull, John Singleton Copley, Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and Thomas Eakins.

The history of architecture and the built environment in the Indian subcontinent from ancient times to the present. Sacred and secular buildings; design principles and ornamental programs; urban forms; landscape; modern revivals; colonial and postcolonial engagements with past architectural traditions.

Students create and execute original projects in materials science using biotechnological tools. Introduction to the technical examination of art, with analysis of works from Yale University Art Gallery collections; the chemical basis of artist’s materials; applied techniques in biomolecular evolution.

Enrollment limited. Preference to students with a strong high-school background or college-level course work in chemistry and/or biology.

The diversity of identities created by the interaction of Roman imperial culture and local traditions in the Roman provinces. Issues related to daily life, politics, technology, and religion. Close work with objects from the Yale University Art Gallery, including mosaics, ceramics, glass, textiles, coins, and jewelry.