Module co-ordinator: TBA
Summer Term (15 units)
Aims of the module
- To provide an historical survey of European art and architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, identifying the principal styles and developments of the period and relating them to the cultural and creative contexts in which art was produced in Italy, France, Spain, Flanders and the Dutch Republic.
- To enable students to relate art and architecture to the different requirements of patronage from major court centres and the church in the seventeenth century, and to the emergence of new ideas and influences, and critical concepts, in the eighteenth century.
- To enable students to identify key creative figures and critics from the period, and to recognise the principal characteristics of the Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassical period styles.
- To contribute to a broad knowledge of European art history as part of a sequence of survey courses providing a background to understanding western art history and visual culture, and to interpreting works of art and architecture in their relevant contexts.
Module content
The module covers the major currents in European art and architecture extending from the Baroque style to the Rococo and Neoclassicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the emergence of Romanticism. The impact of the Council of Trent on artistic ideas in the Counter Reformation (Catholic Revival) Church and the development of the ‘aesthetic reform’ and Baroque in Rome is surveyed through the works of key artists and architects from Caravaggio and the Carracci to Bernini, Borromini and the Late Baroque. The development of French classical baroque styles, the influence of Rubens on religious and secular art in Europe, the rise of the Dutch Republic and the nationally and nationalistically distinct styles and the market for art which emerged in its mercantile culture, and the impact of French court culture through Louis XIV and the creation of Versailles in the later-17th century are examined, and the influence of the French Rococo on European art in the early-18th century which followed. Social, intellectual and political contexts, as well as patronage and emerging markets, are considered to set the work of individual artists and architects in their appropriate period contexts. The transformation of style in the mid-18th century with the critical rejection of rococo artifice by the French Enlightenment critic Diderot, the renewal of classical ideals which developed through the writings of art historians such as Winckelmann and the rediscovery of sites such as Pompeii, Herculaneum and of antiquities in Greece and Asia Minor, and the impact on art, aesthetics and architecture of the French Revolution and Empire are outlined to illustrate the changes in the receptions of and responses to antiquity which influenced the art and architecture of the period.
Assessment
- Comparative visual exercise (25%)
- 2,000-word essay (25%)
- 2-hour examination (50%)
Key texts
- S. Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (John Murray, 1983)
- J. Brown, Painting in Spain 1500-1700 (1998)
- J. Brown, The Golden Age of Painting in Spain (1991)
- Matthew Craske, Art in Europe 1700-1830 (1997)
- H. Hibbard, Bernini (1990)
- Hugh Honour, Neoclassicism. Style and Civilisation (1968)
- V. Hyde Minor, Baroque and Rococo Art (1999)
- M. Milner Kahr, Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century (1993)
- E. Prettejohn, Beauty and Art 1750-2000 (2005)
- R. Rosenblum, Transformations in Late-Eighteenth Century Art (1967)
- A. Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth Century Art and Architecture (2005)
- M. Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718 (1996)
- R. Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750 (6th ed., 1999)
