Courses of Study 2015-2016 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
Courses of Study 2015-2016 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Add to Favorites (opens a new window)

ARTH 6603 - [Perplexing Pictures: Puzzles and Problems in Early Modern Art]


     
Next offered 2017-2018. 4 credits.

Co-meets with ARTH 4603 /VISST 4603 .

L. Pincus.

This seminar studies a group of early-modern images (ca. 1400-1750) deemed “meaningless” or “impossible”-resistant to the usual methods of art historical interpretation and consequently cited as insoluble irritations to the discipline. We will examine particular images by Vermeer, Velázquez, Leonardo, Giorgione, among others, as meta-pictorial art, in other words, art that reflects upon its own making and the nature of representation. In the process, we’ll reevaluate fundamentals of art-historical discourse-the problems of the unitary subject and subjectivity, detection and picture-as-puzzle, ambiguity as modality, and realism as a problematic. In our search for the location of meaning in the visual arts we’ll attempt theoretically open-ended strategies, among them art as experiment, paintings without subject, materiality and self-reflexivity. Our authors will include Elkins, Aristotle, Derrida, Panofsky, Stoichita, Berger, Ginzburg, and Steinberg among others.



Add to Favorites (opens a new window)