ARTH 232
The Visual Culture of Renaissance Rome Spring 2016
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

George Eliot called Rome “the city of visible history”–a place with the power to bring “the past of a whole hemisphere” right before our eyes. The magnetic visual power of Rome did not just occur naturally, however; it is a product of a temporally vast urban project first envisioned by Renaissance popes, and brought into being by the artists and architects they hired. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Rome was transformed from a shrinking and neglected medieval town into a thriving center of artistic energy and invention. This course focuses on the historical, geographic, and ideological forces behind this period of renovation and restoration: forces that reshaped the urban fabric of the city while energizing the visual arts. The course will move toward the moment of the “High Renaissance” by examining its particularly Roman foundations. We will study monuments such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, then, not simply as touchstones for the history of European art, but also as images capable of reflecting, and even constructing, a uniquely Roman sense of power, time, and historical destiny.