European and American art and architecture from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century focusing on the relationship between art and science. This course will investigate early modern artistic and collecting practices, organic materiality and ecocriticism, and landscape theory and use.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students will be expected to produce an extensive research paper on specific works or issues related to the field and the methodologies appropriate to the topic under consideration in the course. This paper will be a detailed, in-depth consideration of the student's chosen theme requiring not only a demonstration of advanced research skills (including the ability to read and use material presented in foreign languages), but also an articulation of the student's ability to understand and manipulate the critical apparatus of art history.
Athena Title
The Natural History of Art
Prerequisite
Two ARHI 3000-level courses and permission of major
Semester Course Offered
Not offered on a regular basis.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
Students will develop an understanding of seventeenth-century Wunderkammern filled with commingled objects of naturalia and artificialia.
Students will investigate and recognize the role of the natural world and natural philosophy within developing styles, themes, aesthetic theories, and institutional structures of Euro-American art practices ca. 1600-1914.
Students will develop an understanding of methods of classification and categorization, natural history illustration, and the presence of the organic within “decorative” styles from rococo to art nouveau.
Students will be challenged to look, think, read, and write in a critical, and eco- critical, manner about visual art and its ideas.
Students will engage in critical academic discussions and through written responses through class discussions, exams, and papers.
Topical Outline
The course outline is organized around four thematic units, which follow a roughly chronological path from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
In the first half of the semester, students will investigate, through primary sources and secondary literature, The Wonder of Art and Nature; Classification and Categorization; and Natural History Illustration.
From this human centered approach, the second half of the course will focus on individual materials and their materiality.
Each class period will examine an individual material through recent art historical work taking an eco-critical approach; materials will include (but are not limited to) wood, clay, marble, ivory, silver, aluminum, and animal hide.
