ARTH 424
Heaven's Gate:The Romanesque Sculpted Portal and the Creation of Sacred Space Through Art Spring 2020
Division I
Cross-listed
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

During the course of the eleventh century, the designers of European churches fashioned a new architectural language that we now label “Romanesque.” One of the most innovative and dramatic aspects of this new language was its assimilation of monumental sculpture, absent in Europe since the fifth century. The focus of attention in this regard was the portal, which marked the threshold between the profane realm of the outside world and the sacred space of the church. Often characterized as the “marquee of the Middle Ages,” the Romanesque sculpted portal, with its startling juxtaposition of the spiritual and the physical, of ecstatic visions of the heavenly realm and writhing, biting monsters, constitutes one of the true high-points of creativity in medieval art. Through the lens of modern scholarship, this seminar will investigate the antecedents and origins of the Romanesque sculpted portal and examine in detail its most renowned manifestations. Emphasis will be placed on understanding these often complex sculptural schemes within their original functional and material contexts, especially in terms of how they helped to create the sacred space of the church behind. Students will then have the opportunity to develop their own research projects, informed by what we have learned in the seminar, but focused on an example of sacred threshold art of their own choosing.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 14
Expected: 8
Class#: 3321
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: class discussion/participation, oral presentation, and a 15- to 20-page research paper
Prerequisites: permission of instructor
Enrollment Preferences: Art majors and graduate students
Distributions: Division I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ARTH 424 Division I ARTH 523 Division I
Attributes: ARTH pre-1800

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