ART 3801 - Art History: Late Antique to Medieval Rome

Fall or spring. 4 credits.

Counts as art history elective for B.F.A. students. Offered in Rome.

Staff.

This course examines the metamorphoses and continuities that characterize Roman artistic culture and its urban and architectural settings during the thousand-year “Age in the Middle” between pagan Roman antiquity and the early Renaissance. Class meetings take place on location in the city, permitting first-hand study of extant works in situ. These range chronologically from the grand Constantinian projects of the fourth century to the illusionistic experiments of Pietro Cavallini and Jacopo Torriti, which immediately preceded and inspired those of Giotto. Monumental painting, mosaic, architecture, and stone sculpture constitute major foci of the course, as do other arts high in the medieval hierarchy of media such as manuscript illumination, ivory and wood carving, metalwork, textiles and embroidery, and the multimedia events-liturgies, processions, coronations, pilgrimages-in whose service much medieval Roman art and architecture were created.