| Description: | This course introduces students to the richness and complexity of Renaissance art, focusing mainly on iconography and iconology. Students will learn how to understand major works of Renaissance art (mainly paintings) within the context of religious, classical and humanistic elements of 15th- and 16th-century culture. The course is based on a series of case studies which are investigated weekly, and will include masterpieces by Jan Van Eyck, Piero della Francesca, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo and Holbein. The works chosen demonstrate how the system of Renaissance figurative arts, full of symbols and allegories, was meant to be understood by a learned public. Each work will be analyzed with reference to the three levels of meaning involved in an iconographic approach as defined by Erwin Panofsky: primary or natural subject matter, secondary or conventional, and intrinsic meaning or context. |