Outside and Visiting Student Module Choices 2012-13
Year 1 Core Modules
Autumn Term
HA1A1 – Introduction to Art History: The Natural World and the Arts of Modernity
Spring Term
HA1A2 – Introduction to Art History: Classicism and the Arts of Christianity
Year 2 Full Year Modules
HA2A2 – Art and Society in Renaissance Florence
HA2A5 – Art since the 1960’s
HA2A6 – The City and its Images
HA1A1 - INTRODUCTION TO ART HISTORY: THE NATURAL WORLD & THE ARTS OF
MODERNITY
Convenor: Karen Lang
This module comprises a series of lectures and related seminars which look at the two
themes of The Natural World and The Arts of Modernity. The module will provide a historical
survey of western art which - instead of adopting a conventional chronological approach employs a thematic one which encourages stimulating cross-comparisons across time and
space. It will introduce students to the broad spectrum of images, ideas and approaches
which the history of art comprises. Students will acquire a basic grasp of the essential areas
which they will need to use as reference points for other modules in the degree.
This first-year core module will give students a foundation in the history of art, architecture
and the applied arts from the Middle Ages to the present day. It will continue to train
students in core skills (of visual analysis, use of specialist vocabulary and methodology,
essay writing, seminar presentation) essential to their progress.
Sample Syllabus (subject to change):
Medieval Nature
The classical landscape
Villa and country house
The politics of the English landscape garden
The Anatomy of nature
The city
Garden city and garden suburb
Land art
The painting of modern life
Cubism and Primitivism ca 1910
Art and industry at the Bauhaus
Mechanical Reproduction - Photography and Film
Commodity Culture
Originality
Postmodernism
Assessment:
1 x 2500-word assessed essay (50%) and a 2-hour examination in Summer term (50%).
Introductory Reading:
Andrews, M Landscape and Western Art (Oxford, 1999)
Rosenthal, M British landscape painting (1980)
Sonfist, A Art in the land: a critical anthology of environmental art (1983)
Williams, R The country and the city (1973)
Herbert, R Impressionism: art, leisure and Parisian society (1991)
Crow, T The rise of the sixties (1996)
HA1A2 - INTRODUCTION TO ART HISTORY: CLASSICISM AND THE ARTS OF
CHRISTIANITY
Convenor: Lorenzo Pericolo
The module is formed by a series of lectures and related seminars that address the
intertwined themes of Classicism and Christianity. The module will provide a historical survey
of western art and concentrates on late antique, medieval and Renaissance art, periods with
which our first year students are often unfamiliar. The lectures follow a broadly chronological
sweep, while the related seminars will concentrate on issues of technique, terminology and
iconography. The key aim of this module is to empower students with the ability to describe
what they see – in terms of how an image or object is made, as well as its form and
iconography. Students will acquire a basic grasp of the essential areas which they will need
to use as reference points for other modules in the degree.
This first-year core module will give students a wide chronological foundation in the relevant
factual material, and it will also train students in core skills (of visual analysis, use of
specialist vocabulary and methodology, essay writing, seminar presentation) essential to
their progress.
Sample Syllabus (Subject To Change):
Origins and overview
Classical architecture
The Emperor and the Gods
The human form
Painting and Pompeii
Byzantium
The Christian west
The Italian city-states
The great cathedrals
Renaissance architecture (Italy)
Renaissance painting (Italy)
The northern Renaissance
Renaissance sculpture (Italy)
Collecting antiquity
Disegno and the grand manner
The art of the book
Reform and Counter-Reform
Vasari and art as history
Assessment:
1 x 2500-word assessed essay (50%) and a 2-hour examination in Summer term (50%).
Introductory Reading:
John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture, (London 1980) p/b Thames and
Hudson
J. Seznec, The survival of the pagan gods: the mythological tradition and its place in
Renaissance humanism and art, (Princeton 1972)
Jacob de Voragine, The Golden Legend, (Princeton 1990) 2 vols p/b
London, National Gallery, The Image of Christ, catalogue to the exhibition ‘Seeing Salvation’
2000
HA2A2 - ART & SOCIETY IN RENAISSANCE FLORENCE
Donal Cooper
Florence remains the locus classicus of the Italian Renaisssance, the subject of the most
intensive and innovative research in the field of Renaissance visual culture. This course
introduces you to traditional narratives of artistic genius and renewal, but also addresses
more recent approaches, which have stressed the social, economic, ritual, gendered and
political contexts of Florentine visual culture. We will examine the fine arts of painting and
sculpture, but also architecture, the urban fabric of the city, and how Florentines experienced
art in their daily lives. You will be encouraged to be historiographically literate, to think
critically and independently about visual and contextual material, and to compose reasoned
arguments using material from both. By familiarising students with the debates, genres and
terminology of Italian Renaissance art, this course also provides an excellent grounding for
the material taught during the Venice term in the autumn of the third year.
Sample Syllabus (subject to change):
Introduction: Florence at the dawn of the Renaissance
Giotto’s legacy: Florentine Trecento art
Architecture and sculpture at the Duomo and Baptistery
First amongst equals: Cosimo de’ Medici’s artistic patronage
Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio: The inventors of perspective
Giovanni Rucellai and his architect, Leon Battista Alberti
Florentine palace architecture and the urban setting
The Florentine domestic interior
Fra Angelico at San Marco
Humanism and the revival of antiquity
Brunelleschi’s legacy: Florentine Quattrocento churches
The Della Robbia factory on Via Guelfa
Masters of Disegno: The Pollaiuolo brothers
The Golden Age returns: Lorenzo de’ Medici ‘Il Magnifico’
Verocchio and Leonardo da Vinci
Ghirlandaio’s frescoes in Santa Trinita and Santa Maria Novella
The end of days: Savonarola and Florentine visual culture in the 1490s
Assessment:
2 x 2,000-word assessed essay (50%), 2-hour examination in Summer term (50%)
Introductory Reading:
Francis Ames-Lewis, Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2000)
Phylis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A
Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller, 1986)
Gene Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977)
Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300-1600 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993)
Dale Kent, Cosimo de' Medici and the Italian Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000)
Renaissance Florence. The Art of the 1470s (exhibition catalogue, National Gallery, London),
eds Pat Rubin and Alison Wright (London: National Gallery, 1999)
Anabel Thomas, The Painter's Practice in Renaissance Tuscany (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995)
Evelyn Welch, Art and Society 1250-1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), later
reissued as Art in Renaissance Italy, 1350-1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Renaissance Florence: A Social History, eds Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2
HA2A5 - ART & CULTURE SINCE THE 60s
tba
The Sixties were a seminal period and the themes that dominated that decade have
remained central to art and cultural life in the forty years since. The aim of the course is to
trace the trajectory of these central themes and, in particular, to show the way in which they
became transformed in response to a changing historical and political context. After studying
the cultures of North America and Europe in the period leading up to the 1960s and the
1960s themselves, the seminars will focus on a comparative analysis of significant issues
which have remained of prime concern in contemporary art practices.
Sample Syllabus (subject to change):
Referencing Popular Culture
Minimalism
The Body Politic
Self-Identity
Time and Motion
Lived Experience and the Spectacle
The Disembodied Image
Assessment:
2 x 2000-word assessed essay (50%) and a 2-hour examination in Summer term (50%).
Introductory Reading:
Andrew Causey, Sculpture Since 1945, Oxford 1999
Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (London: 1996)
G Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Detroit, 1977
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, T & H, 1991
(chapters 7 & 8)
Charles Harrison & Paul Woods (eds), Art in Theory, 1900-2000: an Anthology of Changing
Ideas (Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)
HA2A6 - THE CITY & ITS IMAGES: THE MAKING OF MODERN LONDON 1666-1914
tba
The module aims to stimulate a reappraisal of London's unprecedented expansion during a
period which saw the emergence of new building types, the development of the commercial
city, and the city as a thriving centre for the arts. In comparing the London of Wren, Hogarth
and Nash with the Victorian and Edwardian City, themes such as the place of the city in the
national imagination or as theatre for social and intellectual life will be examined. The course
will be taught in an interdisciplinary way that will require knowledge of basic historical texts
and some literature, as well as the study of architecture, painting and graphic media.
The course aims to give students an over-view of the enormous changes in the topography
and architecture of London during this period, and to provide them with training in their
observation and analysis. It will introduce students to a range of sources for studying the
social and cultural life of London: paintings, prints and caricatures, novels, manuals of
behaviour, magazines, and so forth. They will consider the diverse functions of the city, and
the buildings and districts which it comprises, and to encourage students to correlate
significant developments in London with changes in the needs - both actual and perceived of its inhabitants.
Sample Syllabus (subject to change):
London: the image of Augusta
The city as playground
Palaces for a parliamentary state
House and home in Victorian London
Women, sin and the city
Outcast London
Artists and the city
Wren's city churches
Lilies among weeds: church-building in Victorian London
Imperial London
Albertopolis: education, museums and the city
The village in the city
Assessment
2 x 2,000-word assessed essay (50%) and a 2-hour examination in Summer term (50%)
Introductory Reading:
Summmerson, Georgian London
L.Nead, Victorian Babylon
P.Ackroyd, London: a biography
R.Porter, London, a social history