From the Renaissance to Baroque: Art & History, 1400-1700

Spring Semester, 2005

Professor Hui-Hung Chen

Language: Mandarin Chinese

Course Description

From 1400 to 1700, the period between the Medieval and Modern, is called the Renaissance and Baroque eras.  This period is considered as critical for the formation of modernity in Western history.  This course will discuss these 300 years from the angles of the intellectual and cultural histories.  One of the primary sources in the discussion is visual one, because its visual culture, as a product of the time, covers throughout the discourses of art and history, and of several cultural aspects, and is a prominent example for its complex features in Western history.  In addition to the master works of great artists and geniuses, this course will emphasize the plural environments of the culture, to see how the visual discourse interacted with the culture and society, and further possibly influenced the intellectual currents.  Those who are interested in the history and art history are welcomed to enroll, and they can choose their perspectives from individual specialized or interested fields to study.  This course also hopes to echo the recent propensity in the disciplines of history and art history to the close cooperation of both sides, in order for a wider historical view. 

Three themes are included in the course.  The first is the significance of the Renaissance, the transition of European history at that time, and the transformation of the nature of the culture.  Second, the exogenous challenge and internal change that European culture coped with at the sunset of the Renaissance period, from the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries; that is, the key points of “from the Renaissance to Baroque.”  The third one focuses on overall seventeenth-century Europe, the issues surrounding which would include two geographical contexts: Europe, and colonies and missions outside of Europe.  How European expansion and foreign missions affected the world view of the Europeans, further giving rise to modernity, is the primary topic of this theme.  Baroque art will be re-evaluated in this historical background.

Contents

First Theme

1. The Dawn of the Middle Age

2. Problems of the Renaissance; The Recovery of Classicism and Humanism

3. Renaissance Heritage: Art, Society, and People

4. Rome and the Vatican

5. Northern Renaissance

Second Theme

6. Michelangelo and the Late Renaissance

7. The Protestant Reformation

8. Mannerism and the Questions of “Baroque”

9. Catholic and Artistic Reform of the Late Sixteenth Century

10. Printing and Books: The Formation of Early-Modern European Knowledge

Third Theme

11. Bernini and St. Peter’s

12. European Expansion in the New World and Africa

13. Rubens and the North

14. Encounters with Asia

15. Religious and Intellectual Developments in the Seventeenth Century: Popular Culture and Sciences

16. Distribution of Artistic Style and Forms in Europe and Overseas

Conclusion

17. Interaction between Art and History; The Significance of Early Modern Europe

Bibliography

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Bouwsma, William J.  The Waning of the Renaissance 1550-1640.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

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Brucker, Gene.  Renaissance Florence.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Delumeau, Jean.  Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation.  Trans. Jeremy Moiser.  London: Burns & Oates, 1977.

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Shearman, John.  Mannerism.  New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

Stinger, Charles L.  Renaissance in Rome.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Sutton, Peter C. ed.  The Age of Rubens.  New York, 1993.

Wisch, Barbara, and Diane Cole Ahl, eds.  Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Wittkower, Rudolf.  Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750.  1958.  Reprint, New York, 1985.

———.  Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism.  New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.