ARTH 290
Enslavement and Colonialism in Dutch Painting, ca. 1500-1800 Spring 2022
Division I
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This introductory lecture course to Dutch art from 1560-1795 will study how the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism were central to the mythic construction of a Dutch Golden Age. From the iconic paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer to the pictorial reproductions of the plantations in Indonesia and the Americas, we will ask how the visual record of this period has both written and erased the violent histories that are integral to the canon of Dutch painting. The course will begin with the iconoclastic riots in Antwerp in the 1560s and end with the slave revolt in the Dutch Colony of Curaçao in 1795, and throughout we will ask how to tell this history of enslavement and colonialism over two centuries when the voices of the enslaved and colonized were excised from the historical record.