ART 323 - Global Early Modern Visual Culture

This course explores art produced around the world during the sixteenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, a period of intense contact between cultures with widely varying ideas about what constitutes art. Out of this contact came a myriad of strange works of art that speak to the pressures of often violent colonial and economic encounters. We will look at the impact on European art of contact with Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, as well as the ways in which European art and culture changed the local traditions of art making in the rest of the world. We will consider what happens to culturally specific forms and styles when they cross cultural, geographical, ideological, political, and theological boundaries. Among the topics we will discuss are the Italian Renaissance nude, miraculous images in New Spain and Peru, Mughal miniatures, African ivory carvings, one-point perspective, Protestant European printed representations of Native Americans, Japanese iconoclasm, and chinoiserie.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): ART 201
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2023-24
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).