History of Art

This introductory course explores and compares major developments in world art and architecture from the dawn of history, through several ancient and medieval civilizations, down to the era of the Black Death in Europe (mid-14th century). We will focus primarily on Egypt and the ancient Levant, the Mediterranean world of Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, the Islamic Middle East and Spain, and selected aspects of the arts of India, China, and Japan.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This introductory course explores and compares major developments in the arts primarily in Asia, Europe, North Africa, and North America from the fourteenth century to the present day, looking in particular at architecture, painting, sculpture, the arts of the object (ceramics, metalwork, etc.), printmaking, photography, and, starting in the twentieth century, new media. Throughout the semester, we will explore how the artistic practices and theories under consideration relate to their specific historical, intellectual, social, political, and geographical contexts, and we will also consider the roles that works of art and artists played in shaping many of those very same contexts

Area: Humanities

A survey of the art and architecture of Asia, from the ancient world to the present and including the Indian subcontinent, China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

Area: Humanities

This course is an introduction to the art of the Islamic world, covering a geography that stretches from Spain to India and a chronology that extends from the seventh century into our own time. Within this rich and varied continuum, we will look at a range of art forms—including architecture, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and calligraphy—in relation to such themes as patronage, production, function, and audience. A number of the artworks will be viewed firsthand in local collections. We will also explore the intersection of Islamic art with today’s political realities.

Area: Humanities

This course explores key monuments of medieval art and architecture in Italy from c. 400 until 1350. We will concentrate on historical, functional, and aesthetical aspects that lead to the creation of single monuments and art works. Emphasis is given to the analysis of “sacred space” by means of architecture, painted, and sculptural decoration, as well as ritual performances. Another focus is laid on the emergence on the political dimension of art for the creation of civic identity as well as in the context of the late medieval courts. We raise questions about the importance of materiality and science for the creation of medieval art works.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course provides a basis for the study of Mesoamerican visual cultures and urban settings. We will explore the artistic production of the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec as well as works created by the artists of Teotihuacan, Monte Albán, and West Mexico. With a focus on aesthetics and cultural function, case studies range from stone sculpture, painted ceramics, and screenfold codices, to architectural complexes from Mexico and Central America. Themes to be discussed include: representations of humans and deities, monumentality and rulership, mutilation and destruction of monuments, and ritual and political significance of materials.

Area: Humanities

How does a notary’s son trained as a painter come to claim expertise in the construction of machines and acquire knowledge of the principles of optics, human anatomy, the flight of birds, the dynamics of air and water? The course will focus critically on the myth of Leonardo’s singularity and explore his achievements with regard to the artisanal culture of his time, as well as the problems of authority in the recognition of artisanal knowledge as scientific discovery.

Area: Humanities

This course offers a broad introduction to the arts of colonial Latin America: students will become familiar with the artistic production in the areas of Latin America invaded and controlled by the Spanish Crown from the time of the conquests in the sixteenth century to independence movements in the early nineteenth century. We will explore a wide range of materials from maps to featherwork, paintings to urban grids, cathedrals to mummy bundles. The course is thematically organized, such that students will not only become familiar with the art of Latin America, but will come to understand critical topics related to the study of early modern colonialism: conquest, race, missionary control, literacy, extraction, and indigenous and imperial systems of governance.

Area: Humanities

Explores the different ways Early Modern painters and printmakers incorporated mirrors and optical reflections into their works for the sake of illusion and metaphor, deception and desire, reflexivity and truth-telling. Connecting sense perception and ethical knowledge, embedded mirror images often made claims about the nature of the self, the powers of art, and the superiority of painting in particular.

Area: Humanities

This course critically examines the visual arts through the medium of documentary, historical, and Hollywood film. Coverage is mostly North America and Mesoamerica.

Area: Humanities

This course serves as an introduction to the art and architecture of the Mediterranean region between the early Christian period and the Second Crusade (c. 250-1150). We will analyze the interactions between WesternEuropean, Byzantine, and Islamic cultures through the development of religious art and architecture, asking specifically how these interactions were mediated by culturally distinct representational practices. The course will cover the broad Mediterranean region by focusing on specific sites of interaction around the Sea (i.e. Islamic Spain, Norman Sicily, Byzantine North Africa, Venice and the Adriatic Coast, and Crusader Palestine). Select topics will include: the rise of religious image theory and its effect on the visual cultures of the Mediterranean region; the trans-regional movement of artists, crafted objects, and artistic technologies; the history of urbanism and the production of artistic objects in port cities and centers of trade; and the concept of the Mediterranean as “Premodern Globalism.” Readings will include both primary and secondary sources, and we will investigate a variety of methods and approaches to the interpretation of art objects.

Area: Humanities

This course examines the art and architecture of East, South, and Southeast Asia produced since the mid-twentieth century. We will engage with theoretical, visual, and political developments in the recent art of this region, reading statements by artists and architects, discussing the rising commercial and international profile of contemporary Asian art, and exploring established and emerging art histories of this period.Cross-list with East Asian Studies

Area: Humanities

This course explores seven centuries of fruitful collaboration between physicians and artists, uncovering the shared discourses, diagnostic techniques and therapeutic agendas that united the art of picture-making with the art of healing. Topics include the origin and development of medical illustration; the long, cross-cultural history of the therapeutic artefact; the anatomical investigations of Renaissance artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo; depictions of bodily pain and disease in the art of Matthias Grünewald and psychosomatic syndromes like melancholy in the work of Albrecht Dürer; the spectacularization of the body in Enlightenment science and the ethics of medical specimen display today -- all in order to bring the complex intersections of the history of medicine and the history of art into view.

Area: Humanities

What is the relationship between art and the environment? What are “geoaesthetics?” This course explores the interrelationships between ecosystem and creative responses and practices in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. Specifically, the class will examine the intersections between artistic and architectural practices and the natural environment during the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt, the Neo-Assyrian period in ancient Mesopotamia, and the Minoan Bronze Age in the ancient Aegean.

Area: Humanities

This lecture course will offer a selective, thematic exploration of the art of sculpture as practiced in the Middle Ages, from the fall of the Roman empire in the 4th century CE to height of the Gothic era. The primary concern will be to analyze sculpture in all of its forms – monumental free-standing, architectural, liturgical, and commemorative – as the primary medium utilized by patrons, both private and corporate, to display political messages to an ever growing public.

Area: Humanities

Performance art is provocative and often controversial because it troubles, without dissolving, the distinction between art and life. Not just a matter of activating bodies, engaging viewers, or spurring participation, performance art asks what it means to perform, and what kinds of actions count, in contemporary culture. As such, performance art allows us to rethink established art historical concerns with form, perspective, and materiality, while offering critical insight into everyday life. We will explore how performance art addresses ingrained assumptions about action and passivity, success and failure, embodiment and mediation, “good” and “bad” feelings, emancipation and dependency.The study of performance art invites transdisciplinary approaches. Students from across the university are welcome. Our attention to a diverse array of artists and practices will be supplemented by readings in art history and criticism, as well as in feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and political thought.

Area: Humanities

Explores the major painters and printmakers working in the Netherlands during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the period that saw the outbreak of the Reformation, the revolt against Spanish rule, iconoclasm, the birth of the Dutch Republic, and the establishment of a Dutch colonial empire. Featured artists include Jan Gossaert, Pieter Aertsen, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan Brueghel, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Steen, Jan Vermeer, and others.

Area: Humanities

The course will focus on the controversies surrounding the representation of the body in the writings and figurative art of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, the historical circumstances under which the most admired artist in Europe was attacked as a blasphemer and an idolator, and the effect of widespread calls for censorship on his later production. The writings of Michelangelo, Pietro Aretino, Benvenuto Cellini and own writings will be considered with a focus on their staging of an ambivalent and transgressive eroticism.

Area: Humanities

This course investigates the impact of political, religious, and social change for the making of art and architecture in the city of Rome from Constantine the Great (ca. 274-337 CE) until 1308, when the papal court moved to Avignon. From being a thriving metropolis and the political center of an empire in a pagan, multi-ethnical society, Rome became a small town of a few thousand inhabitants dwelling in the ancient ruins under the spiritual leadership of a powerless Christian bishop and unprotected from the invasions of the migrating peoples from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Later transformations concern the rise to political power of the popes, achieved by the military alliance with the Frankish dynasty of Charlemagne around 800, and the controversy over the superiority of power between the German emperors and the Roman popes. How did the transformation from worldly to religious power affect the architecture of public buildings in the city? What strategies were developed to visually promote the new religious leaders of the city, the popes, and the new Christian God? How did the new status of Rome as one of the most important Christian pilgrim sites with its countless bodies of Early Christian martyrs in the catacombs outside the city influence urban development? And finally, what impact did the economical ups and downs in these periods of transition have for the arts? As we try to reconstruct the ‘image’ and the appearance of medieval Rome, this course discusses ideas and concepts behind different forms of leadership, both political and religious, as they intersect with the power of the arts and the self-referential character of a city that is obsessed with its own past.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Ethiopia played a foundational role in modern-day civilization and culture: as the find site of Lucy, the earliest bipedal hominid, the seat of the Queen of Sheba’s kingdom, the second country in the world to adopt Christianity in the early 4th century CE, and the nexus of exchange between Africa, Europe, and Asia. In fall 2023, The Walters Art Museum will mount the exhibition tentatively titled, Ethiopia at the Crossroads, which addresses Ethiopia’s relationship and artistic exchange with its surrounding cultures, including South Arabia, Nubia, Egypt, Byzantium, Armenia, Italy, and India. It also discusses the impact of Ethiopian art beyond its borders, bringing works of Ethiopian contemporary art into dialogue with the historical Ethiopian art that these artists draw upon in their work. The exhibition covers approximately 1,750 years of Ethiopian history with a special focus on the art of the medieval period, broadly conceived. The course will also offer insights into how a museum exhibition is developed from the initial concept to the physical presentation in the galleries.

Area: Humanities

The development of archaeology in the Middle East – its history of explorers, diplomats, missionaries and gentlemen-scholars – profoundly shaped the modern world, from the creation of new museums and the antiquities market to international relations and terrorism.

Area: Humanities

This thematic course will explore the art, architecture, material culture, and textual evidence from the ancient city of Athens, the many cultures and social positions that made up the ancient city, and the idea of the city as something far beyond its reality. We will take a number of field trips to museums in the area and some of your assignments will be based in local museums.

Area: Humanities

From 900 to 609 BCE, the Assyrian Empire dominated the ancient Near Eastern world, stretching from western Iran to the Mediterranean and Egypt. In concert with imperial expansion came an explosion of artistic production ranging from palace wall reliefs to small-scale luxury objects. This course provides an integrated picture of the imperial arts of this first world empire, situating it within the broader social and political contexts of the first millennium BCE. In its conquest of foreign lands, this powerful state came in contact with and appropriated a diversity of cultures, such as Phoenicia, Egypt, and Greece, which we will also study.

Area: Humanities

This course is an investigation into the fashioning of Venetian identity in architecture and the visual arts, with a particular address to the encounter with Byzantine and Islamic traditions and exchanges with other centers of the Italian peninsula.

Area: Humanities

The course focuses on art and architecture in the political and religious contexts of the Middle East, from the 4th to the 14th c. The three monotheistic religions all claimed specific territories -- in particular the city of Jerusalem -- for cult practices. This situation resulted in military conflicts that had an impact of Jewish, Medieval, Byzantine, and Islamic art in the Holy Land. The political conflicts, which still plague the region today, are rooted in the complex situation of the medieval period. The Roman, Arab, Byzantine, and crusader invasions resulted however in exciting eclectic styles that characterize the art and architecture of the region. We will discuss concepts behind political and religious leadership, as they intersect with the power of the arts.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Viewed within the dynamic historical context of colonial society, we consider the pictorial, sculptural, and architectural programs that ensued in viceregal Peru (1532-1825). We examine the role of religious orders, art schools, artisan guilds and cofradía, and consider the social and political implications of art patronage.

Area: Humanities

The book was the primary source for the collection of knowledge in the Middle Ages. It was also the medium for the preservation and proliferation of the texts that underlay the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Finally, the book served as a source for elite entertainment, perhaps most importantly in Late Antiquity and the later Middle Ages. This course investigates the role of the illustrated book within the political, religious, and artistic developments that took place after the rise of Christianity from the end of the Roman Empire until the early modern period in the medieval West and in Byzantium, permeating Jewish and Islamic traditions. We will examine how the different types of books, such as horizontal and vertical scrolls, large and miniature size codices influenced the placement, conception, and style of the illustrations. The course also addresses processes of manufacture, issues of materiality (i.e. precious multi-media book covers, papyrus, parchment, paper), and the relationship between text and image. A major aspect of the seminar focuses on the performative aspect of the book in its wide range of functions: secular and liturgical, public and private. Students will be able to work first hand with manuscripts and facsimiles from the rare book collection of Eisenhower Library and the Walters Art Museum.

From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, visual forms and practices linked such far-flung places as Mexico City and Naples, Manila and Lima, Cuzco and Antwerp, Quito and Madrid: all cities in the Spanish Empire. This course is conceived as a voyage, moving city by city to explore objects that connected Spain’s vast holdings. We will investigate how the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church used visual strategies to consolidate political power and instill religious faith across the world; and, alternatively, we will consider how local conditions, concerns, and resistance reshaped those efforts. This course surveys a diverse range of artistic production: religious paintings and sculptures; maps used for imperial surveillance; luxury goods crafted from shimmering feathers, ceramics, ivory, and precious metals; urban design and architecture from the ports of Europe to the highland outposts of the Andes; ephemeral cityscapes for civic performances. In examining such materials, students will be introduced to the art historical methods and theoretical concerns used to study a wide diversity of objects within an imperial frame.

Area: Humanities

This course examines a set of case studies spanning the last century that will enable us to explore the shifting landscape of Asian transnational art and architecture. Each week will focus on a different artist, group, exhibition, architect, urban space, or site to unpack artists’ and architects’ engagements with the changing landscape of immigration policies, movements to build solidarity with other artists of color, and campaigns for gender and sexual equality. The course will situate these artists within American art, and build an expansive idea of Asia America to include the discussion of artists whose work directly addresses the fluidity of location and the transnational studio practice.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Centered on modern-day Turkey and encompassing vast territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1923) was the longest lived and among the most powerful Islamic states in history, with an artistic tradition to match. This course explores the functional and symbolic role that architecture played during the empire’s formative centuries, when three successive capital — Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul — served to visualize the sultans’ growing claims to universal authority. With reference to mosques, palaces, tombs, and other categories of architecture, the course will examine the buildings in their artistic, social, and political contexts. Themes to be addressed include patronage and audience, architectural practice and the building trade, ceremonial and ritual, topography and urban planning, and the relationship of Ottoman architecture to other traditions.

Area: Humanities

This course examines the visual and material culture of the Dutch Golden Age as the product of global forces. The young Dutch Republic quickly achieved a global reach in the seventeenth century. And Amsterdam served as its commercial capital, which by 1630 could be counted as one of the most important port cities in the world and home to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the world’s first multinational corporation. Moving an incredible quantity of goods (spices, silks, porcelain, coffee, precious stones, “exotic” arts, and slaves) generated not only the economic riches, but also the cultural touchpoints that would give rise to art produced by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, and the many exceptional craftsmen that have left us some of the most enduring masterpieces of the seventeenth century. This course situates that art, and the city of Amsterdam itself, within networks that connected it to such far flung places as Japan, Jakarta, Surinam, Curacao, Brazil, and the Indian Subcontinent.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Long characterized in the Western imagination as exotic realms of fantasy, harems in Islamic tradition served as private domestic quarters for the women of elite households. This course explores the harem—as an institution, a physical space, and a community of women—from various art-historical perspectives, considering such topics as the harem’s architecture, the agency of its inhabitants as patrons and collectors, the mediating role of eunuchs in the harem’s visual and material culture, and the ability of harem women to make their mark through public artistic commissions. Our case studies will address a range of Islamic geographical and chronological contexts, though we will focus on the empires of the early modern period and, above all, the famous harem of the Ottoman sultans at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. In challenging popular misconceptions, the course will also look at the wealth of exoticizing imagery that the harem inspired in Western art, which we will consider through Orientalist paintings at the Walters Art Museum and illustrated rare books at Hopkins itself.

Area: Humanities

To what extent was the body and its depiction a site of contestation, identification, or desire in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? If the body in the West since the 1800s is seen to have been shaped by the rise of photography and film, the institutionalization of biomedicine, and the establishment of techniques of surveyance and mechanization, then how was the body represented, disciplined, and experienced in the preceding centuries? In an age of unprecedented encounter with non-European bodies, what did it mean to describe and categorize bodies by race, region, or religion? These are some of the major questions this class seeks to answer, which is fundamentally interdisciplinary as it draws upon insights and methods from anthropology and the history of medicine and history of science to investigate how the body has been represented and imagined in the visual arts. The bodies of the suffering Christ, the female mystic, the dissected cadaver, the punished criminal, and the non-European ‘Other’ will loom large as we work to problematize notions of a normative body, whether in the premodern world or in the contemporary one. While most readings and lectures will concern the body and its representation in the Christian West during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, students are encouraged to work on a topic of their choosing from any geographical area 1000-1800 CE for their research papers.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

The Cold War years bore witness to some of the most radical developments in modern art. An abiding question for artists, writers, and political figures too during this period was what role—if any—could art perform in social and political life, and in the struggle between capitalism and communism in particular. This course examines the political viability of art as this concern was taken up by groups and individuals throughout the world in response to rapidly shifting geopolitical circumstances. Beginning with the visual cultures of the United States and Soviet Union, the course will also examine artistic responses to the conditions of Cold War existence in and beyond countries of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Proceeding roughly chronologically, the course is divided into twelve units following the art of the US, USSR, Western and Eastern Europe, China, and Japan, among others. It treats a wide variety of media as painting and sculpture, canonically privileged in the history of Western art, ceded ground to new forms of practice such as performance, film, and a deep, critical engagement with mass culture. In so doing, this course provides at once a global history of modern art and visual culture and a critical interrogation of their relationships to social change and political life during the 20th century and beyond.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

The arts of Egypt, Greece and the Near East are typically taught separately from one another. However, the Mediterranean Sea has always served as a connector, and the diverse cultures of these areas were in close contact with one another for much of their histories. From 2000 to 500 BCE (the Middle/Late Bronze and Iron Ages), these interactions were particularly dynamic, resulting in a diversity of arts including wall frescoes, precious jewelry, and elaborate furnishings and weaponry. This course examines the arts of the interactions among Egyptians, Near Easterners, Greeks and others. It focuses special attention on the role of artistic products in intercultural relations, including trade, diplomacy, war, imperialism, and colonization.

Prerequisite(s): AS.010.301 - Titled "Art and Interactions in the Eastern Mediterranean from 2000 to 500 BCE" - Students who have taken that course in 2014 or prior are not permitted to take this course.

Area: Humanities

This course examines curative medicine in the Americas through its visual culture and oral histories. Philosophies about the body, health, and causes of illness are considered, as are representations of practitioners and their pharmacology. Case studies are drawn from cross the Americas (Aztec, Moche, Aymara, Paracas, American SW). Collections study in museums, Special Collections.

Area: Humanities

This course will explore modern and contemporary art in colonial and postcolonial contexts from Bangladesh to northern Africa. How do artists negotiate demands to support their national and local identities while participating in modernism across borders? What role do secularism and spirituality have in modern art? How do anticolonial, Marxist, and feminist politics shape art in these regions? How do global economic forces and the rise of powerful collectors, private museums, and international art fairs shape art and artists working across this geographic area? We will foreground the role of women as artists, collectors, patrons, and scholars throughout.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Babylon – the name resonates even today, from the biblical whore of Revelation to sci-fi. It evokes exotic places and time long past. But what do we really know about the ancient city and the civilization that flourished there thousands of years ago? The first part of this course examines the archaeological city of Babylon, located in the modern state of Iraq, and considers its artistic and architectural achievements in the context of Mesopotamian history. The second part of the class explores the ongoing impact of Babylon in the cultural imagination of later periods, from the Classical and biblical authors, to European artists, Hollywood movies, science fiction, and contemporary political movements.

Area: Humanities

The ancient visual arts of Andean South America and their respective cultural contexts form the basis of this course. In conjunction with the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum students will have access to collections for study.

Area: Humanities

The works of Native American artists are examined and discussed in their respective social and historical contexts. Such works include Hopewell stone sculpture, Mimbres pictorial painting, and Tlingit guardian figures. We examine the concept of sacred landscape through analysis of monumental earthworks and effigy mounds, Anasazi architecture, and rock art. In conjunction with the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), and Johns Hopkins Special Collections, students will have access to collections for study.

Area: Humanities

This seminar will culminate in an exhibition in the library, focused on the photographic works of Dayanita Singh (b. India, 1961) in Hopkins’ collections. Singh’s work delves deeply into her subjects, exploring issues of identity, the body, and sexuality as well as questions related to memory and the archive. She has long presented her photography in the form of the book, and as such we will pursue readings in photography, book arts, and the archive, and bring nineteenth-century illustrated books in our collection into dialogue with Singh’s work. This will be a hands-on seminar: students will develop the framework for the exhibition, write the textual materials (labels, wall text), and decide on the arrangements of objects in the show.

Through an examination of colonial exhibitions, the rise of national, regional, and archaeological museums, and current practices of display and representation in institutions, we will explore how the image of South Asia has been constructed in the colonial, modern, and contemporary eras. We will engage with the politics of representation, spectacle, and the economies of desire as related to colonialism and the rise of modernity. Readings from postcolonial theory, museum studies, anthropology, history, and art history.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Advanced inquiry into imperial Inka architecture and fiber arts.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Analysis of ancient Americas collection held in the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum.

Prerequisite(s): AS.010.105 OR AS.010.407 OR AS.010.398 OR AS.010.365 OR AS.010.389 OR AS.010.366 OR AS.010.214 or in consultation with professor prior to registration.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Centering on the tomb as the unit of analysis, this course examines the cultural and material aspects of death and funerary ritual. Case studies are drawn from North America, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. Collections study in museums.

Area: Humanities

The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

The course examines the notion of the authentic in conjunction with medieval images, relic veneration, and the practice of law. It investigates the construction, reception, and theoretical grounding of authenticity of reliquaries, icons, and imprints on cloth or seals, and legal documents. These objects elucidate artistic strategies such as cross media references, abstraction, mimesis and bricolage to convey an aura of authenticity. We address other authenticating factors, such as complex ritualized forms of communication. This is a new course for the undergraduate section, existing course is AS.010.644. Will be taught as a hybrid this Fall 2020.

Writing Intensive

This course addresses the technology, iconography and social significance of metals and draws on case studies from the Americas. Collections study in museums.

Area: Humanities

There is perhaps no more confounding, though also no more persistent, art historical concept than that of “the Baroque.” This course introduces students to foundational histories and critiques of “the Baroque” while exploring works of art that have proved central to these formulations. That is, this course will balance careful reading of historiography with close examination of works of art (both digitally presented and visited in local collections). Students will come away with a layered understanding of the Baroque objects—from relatively small-scale museum works to major architectural and sculptural monuments—and their place within the broader evolution of the history of art. Particular attention will be given to newer global and (post-)colonial approaches to notions of the Baroque, ultra-Baroque, and neo-Baroque.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This seminar will ask how photography produces ways of knowing: how does photography’s reality-effect shape its dissemination and absorption? Is photography’s emergence during the colonial era coincidental or catalytic? How is memory (re)constituted in a photography-saturated world? What kinds of histories does photography encourage and discourage? Is a photograph an object? We will read across disciplines (literature, anthropology, history, history of art, political science, theory) to investigate the epistemology of photography and the photograph.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course introduces students to the principal methods and theories of art history. Students will work through readings foundational for the discipline, texts that define key methodological consolidations in the twentieth century, and more recent (e.g. feminist, visual studies, global, post-colonial, and/or ecological) critiques and rethinking. Specific texts will vary by instructor, but the course seeks—in any instantiation—to include a plurality of perspectives.

Area: Humanities

In the early modern world, people traveled further and more routinely than ever before. This course looks at the tools used to facilitate such endeavors—from maps to navigational charts, from atlases to astrolabes. However, beyond mere logistical instruments for imperial expansion, colonial settlement, and commercial trade, these objects and pictures structured new ways of thinking about and imagining the world and its spaces. An armchair traveler in Amsterdam could envision a journey to and travel within a place like modern-day Indonesia; a Spaniard living in the highlands of present-day Bolivia could imagine, in period terms, “all the cities of the universe and more.” This course attends to excavating the representational economies forged from the mass-production and wide circulation of navigational objects and pictorialized territories. Though the focus will be on the early modern period, we will read broadly and engage a wide range of theories; and students are encouraged to use the tools we develop in class to research representation from any time and place.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

A set of interdisciplinary explorations of the Passion of Christ narrative in Scripture, theology, visionary literature, cultic devotion, the visual and dramatic arts in Europe from the Central Middle Ages to the Reformation, with a special fast-forward to modern cinematic retellings of the Passion story.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

How does modernism operate in the colonial context, work with and against the nationalisms of new countries (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh), challenge existing norms of the art world and the art market, engage with the difficult and violent upheavals of Partition and sectarian conflict, and allow for experimentations and new forms all the while? This course will explore the history of the art of the subcontinent from c. 1880 to the present by critical engagement with the art, artists, and theories at play in the South Asian region.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This seminar explores the technologies of colonial power, from small ephemeral watercolor images of religious processions to massive multi-volume photographic projects documenting the “people of India,” and extending to the establishment of new urban and architectural spaces, archaeological museums, and art schools, the circulation of diplomatic art collections, and the commissioning of survey data. We will engage with the anti-colonial movements of resistance and uprising that took place across this century, examining the central participation of modern artists with these political movements, and explore the way this period fundamentally shaped the foundations for the study of South Asian art and archaeology. Readings will include colonial and postcolonial theory, Orientalism, historiography; we will be actively working with materials in the library’s Special Collections.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

In antiquity, Rome became the capital of an empire, its growing status reflected in its sophisticated urban planning, its architecture, and the arts. While an abundance of studies explores the revival of this glorious past in the Renaissance, this seminar discusses various ways of the reception of antiquity during the medieval period. We address the practice of using "spolia" in medieval architecture, the appropriation of ancient pagan buildings for the performance of Christian cult practices, the continuation of making (cult)images and their veneration, the meaning and specific visuality of Latin script (paleography and epigraphy) in later medieval art. We discuss the revival and systematic study of ancient knowledge (f. ex. medicine, astronomy, and the liberal arts), in complex allegorical murals. As we aim to reconstruct the art and architecture of medieval Rome, this course discusses ideas and concepts behind different forms of re-building and picturing the past, as they intersect with the self-referential character of a city that is obsessed with its own history.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This seminar examines the myriad ways artists and writers geared their work toward the therapeutic healing of mind, body, and soul, and the role images and texts could play in programs of individual and collective transformation. Taking as our point of departure the ancient tradition of spiritual exercises and inner dialogue, Petrarch's therapy of the passions, and the revival of consolatory letters, we will consider how the Christian artist could invest their work with medicinal, magical, sacramental, or spiritual efficacies, and even take on the mantle of a "physician of souls." Intersections with the histories of medicine and religion will lead us to the ways natural medicine and the thaumaturgical practices associated with pilgrimage could be transposed into the arena of spiritual therapy. Featured authors include Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Petrarch, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, and Allain de Botton; artists include Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and many others.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Baltimore’s rich museum and library collections create a dynamic laboratory for students to gain an understanding of early modern European traditions of prints and books. Engraving, etching, woodcut, mezzotint, à la poupée; Rembrandt, Dürer, Aldus Manutius, Plantin-Moretus. This course will introduce students to the basic techniques, concepts, terms, and artists that shaped the production of reproductive works on paper in early modern Europe and their subsequent art historical study. All sessions will be taught out of local collections (BMA, Walters, NGA, Hopkins Special Collections); that is, this is a hands-on class that—while requiring no previous experience—will attend to the nitty-gritty details and methods of studying works in person, giving students the tools, expertise, and confidence to pursue their own research with historical printed materials.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

In the Ottoman Empire—a vast multiethnic state straddling Africa, Asia, and Europe—how one dressed was a deeply political affair. Ottoman rulers and subjects alike used clothing to express (and sometimes transgress) the hierarchical, religious, and communal distinctions defining their society, much to the fascination of foreigners who visited the empire or sought knowledge of its sartorial traditions in texts and images. This seminar will explore Ottoman dress and dress codes in the context of the empire’s long and complicated relationship with Western powers, focusing on the role that costume played as a charged site of cross-cultural interaction, posturing, and self-assertion from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Our case studies will include costume albums—books showing people high and low in their characteristic garb—painted by Ottoman artists for Western buyers; diplomatic robes of honor and their attendant ceremonies; and cultural cross-dressing as manifested in European turquerie portraiture and masquerades. Moving into the modern period, we will consider how nineteenth-century dress reforms bridged the gap between Ottoman and Western costume while engendering new modes of Ottoman sartorial self-representation that challenged hardening Orientalist discourses in such venues as mannequin museums and world’s fairs. The seminar will make considerable use of artworks in local collections, including rare books and prints at Hopkins itself.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Antioch Recovery Project investigates mosaics from the ancient city of Antioch (modern Antakya, Turkey, near the border with Syria) now in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Excavated by an international team of archaeologists in the 1930s, hundreds of ancient mosaics from the cosmopolitan city were subsequently dispersed to museums across the globe, with twenty-four mosaics entering the collection of the BMA. Phase I will focus on the digital documentation and analysis of the mosaic of Narcissus as a prototype for ongoing research bringing together the fragments of ancient Antioch for contemporary beholders. The Greek myth of Narcissus tells the story of a beautiful Theban hunter doomed to love his own reflection and is the origin of the modern psychiatric term “narcissism”. Researching the mythology, materials, conservation history, archival material, historiography, and contemporary reception of the Narcissus mosaic and myth offers extensive opportunities to collaborate with scholars across a range of disciplines at JHU, in the Baltimore museum community, and beyond. Investigators will move between the Baltimore Museum of Art, the CRL processing lab in Gilman Hall, and Special Collections. The course will involve some travel to visit other mosaics from Antioch now in collections at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C., and the Princeton Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey.

Area: Humanities

Almost readable, but not quite: artists in the twentieth and twenty-first century played with script of all kinds, from ancient glyphs and Persian script to Roman typefaces and Korean Hangul. Artists also scribbled in ways that evoke writing without script or meaning. This course takes on the question of meaning-making in art through the form of script—flirting with that tantalizing feeling that we can almost read the work of art through the marks on its surface. We will engage with artists from around the world whose work grapples with knowledge, meaning, and script, and discuss the limits and possibilities of legibility, knowing, and language. In addition to painting and drawing, we will also discuss conceptual art, installation, video, architecture, tapestry, ceramics, graphic novel forms, book arts, and sculpture. We will have opportunities to situate these works within longer histories of script and pseudo-script and image-text relations. Our discussion-driven seminars will be guided by readings in art history and theory. The course carries no expectation that you are multi-lingual or have experience with multiple scripts. Central to our semester will be group trips to see art in person in DC and Baltimore. Assignments include an option for short, focused writing with feedback and opportunities to experiment with genre and to rewrite, or a longer seminar paper, chosen in consultation with the professor.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course investigates the complexities of medieval legal documents, their specific visuality and materiality, as well as practices of copying and forgery. We will address the aesthetics of legal documents, their graphic signs, seals, and paleography and the authenticating strategies used to corroborate their legitimacy. Another emphasis is set on the performative aspects of the medieval charters in court and church rituals. Comparison with contemporary illuminated sacred books will reveal the tight connections of monastic scriptoria and royal/imperial chanceries. The geographic focus is set wide, ranging from medieval Spain, to Carolingian and Ottonian chanceries in France and Germany, to the papal court in Rome and the imperial and monastic scriptoria in Byzantium.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Open to students by arrangement with a faculty advisor in the History of Art Department. Interested students should review the program description available in the department office.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Writing Intensive

You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Writing Intensive

The relationship of “word” and “image” has been a central concern of both the history of art and other humanistic disciplines; and semiotics, (post-)structuralism, narrative studies, media studies, and theories of ekphrasis and representation have been marshalled to probe how visual and verbal systems work in conjunction, overlap, and conflict. Much less art historical attention has been paid to the visuality of writing itself. Against the backdrop of robust work on the relationship between text and image, this course focuses on text as image: the visuality of text, the imagistic dimensions of writing, Schriftbildlichkeit. The seminar takes as guiding premise that art historical method might be robustly brought to bear on the visual and material features of texts, both those that appear as part of traditional art historical media (paintings, sculptures, and architectural monuments) and those that have primarily remained within the purview of other humanistic subfields: books, archival documents, writers’ manuscripts, epistolary communication, and inscriptions (both analog and digital). In this course, we will survey a broad range of textual objects, from ancient inscriptions to moveable type to digital texts to “writing” in twenty-first century artists’ books; and we will work together towards assembling an art historical toolkit for excavating the full valences of texts, accounting for the ways they make meaning in linguistic, semiotic, formal, material, visual, and media-specific registers. Though art historical in focus, this course will be essentially interdisciplinary, and students from other subfields are warmly welcomed. There will be ample opportunity for discussing and studying objects in local collections.

Area: Humanities

Formed against the backdrop of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalism and colonialism, the field of Islamic art history continues to grapple with the overwhelmingly Eurocentric assumptions, narratives, and approaches that shaped its emergence and development. These inherited perspectives and the debates they have sparked are the focus of this seminar, which critically examines the foundational characterizations of Islamic art—as ornamental, iconophobic, and timelessly other—together with the exhibitory, commercial, and scholarly contexts in which such ideas took root. Adopting a simultaneously thematic and chronological approach, the seminar will trace the ways in which diverse constellations of actors—including those from within the Islamic world itself—have variously established, consolidated, or challenged the field’s underlying concepts. We will explore how this discursive process has intensified in our own time, in which a spate of scholarly and popular treatments have laid bare the tension between calls to reevaluate the field and an enduring impulse to reinscribe its established contours. Alois Riegl, Oleg Grabar, Gülru Necipoglu, Yasser Tabbaa, and Wendy Shaw are among the authors whose writings will be assessed and compared. Throughout the seminar, we will ground our historiographical inquiry in discussions of specific works and categories of Islamic art—particularly those like carpets that traditional frameworks have fetishized as decorative—and consider more fruitful avenues for addressing such material, making use of local collections to the extent that we can.

Area: Humanities

The discipline of art history has passed through a number of major methodological and theoretical shifts since its inception (and in particular, over the last thirty years). Foundational disciplinary methods derive principally from the arts of Classical Greece, the Renaissance and contemporary periods. As the discipline embraces an enlarged field of inquiry, particularly drawing upon developments in anthropology, material culture studies, feminism, queer theory, and political theory, additional avenues for understanding the arts of the ancient world are emerging. The seminar focuses on how art historical method and theory – both foundational and emergent – might be profitably applied to the subfields of the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean (understood in the broadest sense).

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This seminar will ask how photography produces ways of knowing: how does photography’s reality-effect shape its dissemination and absorption? Is photography’s emergence during the colonial era coincidental or catalytic? How is memory (re)constituted in a photography-saturated world? What kinds of histories does photography encourage and discourage? Is a photograph an object? We will read across disciplines (literature, anthropology, history, history of art, political science, theory) to investigate the epistemology of photography and the photograph.

The seminar will explore cases of European pre-modern picture-making in various media that solicit tactile as well as sensory engagement, and that call into question the "Albertian" metaphor of pictura as window. Case studies will include mosaics, reliefs, pastiglia, medals, portable paintings, et al.”

Area: Humanities

The role of place in the art historiography of the Renaissance, with readings in geographical theory. The seminar will also consider the role in the art of Lorenzo Lotto, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Cesare da Sesto, Romanino, Moretto, Pordenone, Titian, and other artists active before the canon-formation enterprise of Giorgio Vasari definitively altered the map of Italian art after 1550.

The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.

Writing Intensive

This seminar examines the myriad ways artists and writers geared their work toward the therapeutic healing of mind, body, and soul, and the role images and texts could play in programs of individual and collective transformation. Taking as our point of departure the ancient tradition of spiritual exercises and inner dialogue, Petrarch's therapy of the passions, and the revival of consolatory letters, we will consider how the Christian artist could invest their work with medicinal, magical, sacramental, or spiritual efficacies, and even take on the mantle of a "physician of souls." Intersections with the histories of medicine and religion will lead us to the ways natural medicine and the thaumaturgical practices associated with pilgrimage could be transposed into the arena of spiritual therapy. Featured authors include Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Petrarch, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, and Allain de Botton; artists include Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and many others.

Area: Humanities

Topics in artistic theory and multimedia practice from seventeenth century Italy and Spain to other early modern and modern global baroques.

Area: Humanities

This seminar explores the technologies of colonial power, from small ephemeral watercolor images of religious processions to massive multi-volume photographic projects documenting the “people of India,” and extending to the establishment of new urban and architectural spaces, archaeological museums, and art schools, the circulation of diplomatic art collections, and the commissioning of survey data. We will engage with the anti-colonial movements of resistance and uprising that took place across this century, examining the central participation of modern artists with these political movements, and explore the way this period fundamentally shaped the foundations for the study of South Asian art and archaeology. Readings will include colonial and postcolonial theory, Orientalism, historiography; we will be actively working with materials in the library’s special collections.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

The arts of the Near East, Aegean and Egypt are typically taught separately from one another. However, the Mediterranean Sea has always served as a connector, and the diverse cultures of these areas were in close contact with one another for much of their histories. During the Bronze Age (3000 to 1200 BCE), these interactions were particularly dynamic, resulting in a diversity of arts including wall frescoes, precious jewelry, and elaborate furnishings and weaponry. This course examines the arts of the interactions among Near Easterners, Greeks, Egyptians and others. It focuses special attention on the role of artistic products in intercultural relations, including trade, diplomacy, war and imperialism.Students are not expected to have extensive knowledge of all the areas, although some experience in at least one of them will be helpful. The course will interweave establishing a knowledge base necessary to tackle this topic with broader conceptual concerns and interdisciplinary approaches (art historical, archaeological, anthropological, and historical).There will be a final paper.

Area: Humanities

As a major global power straddling three continents, the Ottoman Empire developed a rich and diversified ceremonial culture aimed at impressing local and international audiences alike. This seminar will explore the ways in which works of art and architecture provided settings and apparatus for, and were themselves shaped and enlivened by, the ceremonial acts in which they featured. Covering the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, we will address a range of case studies—including mosque inaugurations, royal processions, the reception of foreign ambassadors, and the exchange of diplomatic gifts—with regard to their sociopolitical, visual, material, and spatial contexts. A major concern of the seminar will be the question of how Ottoman ceremonies, together with their staging and attendant art forms, were adapted in response to changing conditions and audiences, particularly with the shift from the early modern to the modern period. While our focus will be on the Ottoman Empire, the course will also consider the ceremonial cultures of the various Asian and European polities with which the Ottomans interacted, investigating the points of comparison and contrast that defined these multifarious but connected interregional approaches.

Area: Humanities

There is perhaps no more confounding, though also no more persistent, art historical concept than that of “the Baroque.” This course introduces students to foundational histories and critiques of “the Baroque” while exploring works of art that have proved central to these formulations. That is, this course will balance careful reading of historiography with close examination of works of art (both digitally presented and visited in local collections). Students will come away with a layered understanding of the Baroque objects—from relatively small-scale museum works to major architectural and sculptural monuments—and their place within the broader evolution of the history of art. Particular attention will be given to newer global and (post-)colonial approaches to notions of the Baroque, ultra-Baroque, and neo-Baroque.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

"The Renaissance" as a periodization under attack, and its persistance; the hermeneutics of the Pre-Modern Image since Panofsky; the critique of Eurocentrism; challenges to and recuperations of iconology, assessing the contributions of semiotics, psycholanalysis and queer theory.

Area: Humanities

This course considers the turn to centering materials and materiality in the history of art. Since the publication of Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972) and in particular since the turn of the millennium, critical engagement with the materiality of art has proliferated. This seminar will tackle renewed investment in materiality within the discipline of art history and draw on perspectives from archaeology, philosophy, anthropology, conservation science, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies, among others. Particular emphasis will be placed on the polycentrism of materiality as a theoretical lens that cuts across seemingly disjunct cultural, social, and political frames and subject positions. While this course focuses on the art of the ancient Mediterranean, students will be encouraged to bring their own subfields to bear on the material turn and to pursue research topics related their individual research goals. Open to interested students from all disciplines.

In antiquity, Rome became the capital of an empire, its growing status reflected in its sophisticated urban planning, its architecture, and the arts. While an abundance of studies explores the revival of this glorious past in the Renaissance, this seminar discusses various ways of the reception of antiquity during the medieval period. We address the practice of using spolia in medieval architecture, the appropriation of ancient pagan buildings for the performance of Christian cult practices, the continuation of making (cult)images and their veneration, the meaning and specific visuality of Latin script (paleography and epigraphy) in later medieval art. We discuss the revival and systematic study of ancient knowledge (f. ex. medicine, astronomy, and the liberal arts), in complex allegorical murals. As we aim to reconstruct the art and architecture of medieval Rome, this course discusses ideas and concepts behind different forms of re-building and picturing the past, as they intersect with the self-referential character of a city that is obsessed with its own history.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Baltimore’s rich museum and library collections create a dynamic laboratory for students to gain an understanding of early modern European traditions of prints and books. Engraving, etching, woodcut, mezzotint, à la poupée; Rembrandt, Dürer, Aldus Manutius, Plantin-Moretus. This course will introduce students to the basic techniques, concepts, terms, and artists that shaped the production of reproductive works on paper in early modern Europe and their subsequent art historical study. All sessions will be taught out of local collections (BMA, Walters, NGA, Hopkins Special Collections); that is, this is a hands-on class that—while requiring no previous experience—will attend to the nitty-gritty details and methods of studying works in person, giving students the tools, expertise, and confidence to pursue their own research with historical printed materials.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

The course examines the notion of the authentic in conjunction with medieval images, relic veneration, and the practice of law. It investigates the construction, reception, and theoretical grounding of authenticity of reliquaries, icons, and imprints on cloth or seals, and legal documents. These objects elucidate artistic strategies such as cross media references, abstraction, mimesis and bricolage to convey an aura of authenticity. We address other authenticating factors, such as complex ritualized forms of communication.

This seminar investigates the fascinating landscape of medieval art and architecture of Georgia. Its specific geographic position in the South Caucasus, at the cross roads between the East and West, the Christian and Islamic Worlds, had a profound impact on the art and architecture in the region. Ancient sites show close connections with the Graeco-Roman World on the western border and with the Sassanid Empire in the East. The Christianization of the Kingdom of Kartli in the early fourth century resulted in close ties with the development of early Christian art in Syria, the Holy Land, and Byzantium. While the Christian religion remained an identifying factor during several hundred years of Muslim rule (736 to 1122) during which the city of Tbilisi was the capital of an emirate, Islamic motifs and style became an important factor for art works in medieval Georgia. Art and architecture with a specific Byzantine profile flourished in particular after the reunification of Georgia during the reign of King David the Builder (1073- 1125) and Queen Tamar (1184 to 1213). The cathedral and monastery of Gelati and Mzcheta, the murals in the royal monasteries of Vardzia and Khintsvisi, and the countless icons are a testimony to this relationship. We will discuss the specific diverse aesthetics and materiality (stone, enamel and metal works) of Georgian art with the goal to reassess the map of medieval art and architecture that currently does not include the Eastern Frontier. A mandatory c. 10 days field trip to Georgia is planned after classes end in May 2020.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

In the Ottoman Empire—a vast multiethnic state straddling Africa, Asia, and Europe—how one dressed was a deeply political affair. Ottoman rulers and subjects alike used clothing to express (and sometimes transgress) the hierarchical, religious, and communal distinctions defining their society, much to the fascination of foreigners who visited the empire or sought knowledge of its sartorial traditions in texts and images. This seminar will explore Ottoman dress and dress codes in the context of the empire’s long and complicated relationship with Western powers, focusing on the role that costume played as a charged site of cross-cultural interaction, posturing, and self-assertion from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Our case studies will include costume albums—books showing people high and low in their characteristic garb—painted by Ottoman artists for Western buyers; diplomatic robes of honor and their attendant ceremonies; and cultural cross-dressing as manifested in European turquerie portraiture and masquerades. Moving into the modern period, we will consider how nineteenth-century dress reforms bridged the gap between Ottoman and Western costume while engendering new modes of Ottoman sartorial self-representation that challenged hardening Orientalist discourses in such venues as mannequin museums and world’s fairs. The seminar will make considerable use of artworks in local collections, including rare books and prints at Hopkins itself.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

The seminar will investigate the question of art and reform in three major centers of the Italian peninsula (Rome, Naples, Milan), with attention to parallel phenomena in other centers of Catholic Europe (Spain and the Spanish Netherlands). We will examine transformations in the practice of pilgrimage and the organization of sacred shrines, tensions between centralization and the persistence of the local, and the initiative of artists and architects in responding to the call for a “reform” of sacred art."

Antioch Recovery Project investigates mosaics from the ancient city of Antioch (modern Antakya, Turkey, near the border with Syria) now in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Excavated by an international team of archaeologists in the 1930s, hundreds of ancient mosaics from the cosmopolitan city were subsequently dispersed to museums across the globe, with twenty-four mosaics entering the collection of the BMA. Phase I will focus on the digital documentation and analysis of the mosaic of Narcissus as a prototype for ongoing research bringing together the fragments of ancient Antioch for contemporary beholders. The Greek myth of Narcissus tells the story of a beautiful Theban hunter doomed to love his own reflection and is the origin of the modern psychiatric term “narcissism”. Researching the mythology, materials, conservation history, archival material, historiography, and contemporary reception of the Narcissus mosaic and myth offers extensive opportunities to collaborate with scholars across a range of disciplines at JHU, in the Baltimore museum community, and beyond. Investigators will move between the Baltimore Museum of Art, the CRL processing lab in Gilman Hall, and Special Collections. The course will involve some travel to visit other mosaics from Antioch now in collections at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C., and the Princeton Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey.

Area: Humanities

This seminar focuses on “the cut”—both as material practice and conceptual trope. Looking specifically at the early modern period, we will attempt to stitch together arts of cutting that have all too often been thought of separately or entirely in isolation—decoupage and inlaid stone, silhouette and turned ivory, repurposed drawing and perfectly hewn precious gem, pared-down panel and paper cut-out. To do so, we will look to expansive modern treatments and theorizations of “the cut” as literal gesture and figurative process, material technique and metaphoric mode. At stake is a reappraisal of creative paradigms that rest upon myths of wholeness, finitude, completion, generation, etc., and that thus undergird the early modern emergence of the very notion of “Art.” This seminar thus asks whether recentering the cut has the potential to position the art object within more expansive fields of material culture and to resituate artistic production within less hegemonic frameworks of creation and creativity. Though focused on the early modern period, students are encouraged to pursue research in their own fields/periods of study.

Writing Intensive

A set of interdisciplinary explorations of the Passion of Christ narrative in Scripture, theology, visionary literature, cultic devotion, the visual and dramatic arts in Europe from the Central Middle Ages to the Reformation, with a special fast-forward to modern cinematic retellings of the Passion story.

Bodies—material, artistic, political, cartographic—and their breakdown, form the focus of this seminar. Situating this inquiry in the ancient Mediterranean, we will analyze the human body as an organizing term, giving rise to a robust set of practices and performances. We will consider the conception of atoms as bodies in motion, the role of direct democracy and assembly as they intersect with artistic practices of both figuration and other non-figural corpora, and the emerging body of medical knowledge that would eventually be gathered under the Hippocratic corpus. The Mediterranean sea itself as it connects with other bodies of water and forged connections between different land bodies will also be among the topics we explore. While organized around the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives, students from all formations are very welcome.

Area: Humanities

Almost readable, but not quite: artists in the twentieth and twenty-first century played with script of all kinds, from ancient glyphs and Persian script to Roman typefaces and Korean Hangul. Artists also scribbled in ways that evoke writing without script or meaning. This course takes on the question of meaning-making in art through the form of script—flirting with that tantalizing feeling that we can almost read the work of art through the marks on its surface. We will engage with artists from around the world whose work grapples with knowledge, meaning, and script, and discuss the limits and possibilities of legibility, knowing, and language. In addition to painting and drawing, we will also discuss conceptual art, installation, video, architecture, tapestry, ceramics, graphic novel forms, book arts, and sculpture. We will have opportunities to situate these works within longer histories of script and pseudo-script and image-text relations. Our discussion-driven seminars will be guided by readings in art history and theory. The course carries no expectation that you are multi-lingual or have experience with multiple scripts. Central to our semester will be group trips to see art in person in DC and Baltimore. Assignments include an option for short, focused writing with feedback and opportunities to experiment with genre and to rewrite, or a longer seminar paper, chosen in consultation with the professor.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course investigates the complexities of medieval legal documents, their specific visuality and materiality, as well as practices of copying and forgery. We will address the aesthetics of legal documents, their graphic signs, seals, and paleography and the authenticating strategies used to corroborate their legitimacy. Another emphasis is set on the performative aspects of the medieval charters in court and church rituals. Comparison with contemporary illuminated sacred books will reveal the tight connections of monastic scriptoria and royal/imperial chanceries. The geographic focus is set wide, ranging from medieval Spain, to Carolingian and Ottonian chanceries in France and Germany, to the papal court in Rome and the imperial and monastic scriptoria in Byzantium.

Writing Intensive

The seminar explores common ground between literary and art historical scholarship on Early Modern Europe and beyond; it seeks to further conversation between art historical and literary critical methodologies as well as media theory, and is designed to appeal to students of literature and of art history. Seeking to move beyond the mid-20th century discourses of iconology, it will re-consider the potential of Aby Warburg’s psychological and anthropological approach to the trans-cultural and trans-historical migration of symbols, and its implications for a “global Renaissance.” We will focus on antiquarian scholarship with its considerations of visual and material evidence, ekphrasis and the picturing functions of language, inscription and the legibility of images, the printed book as sylloge and “collection,” the dynamic interrelation of writing and drawing, Renaissance controversies about theater and epic and their implication in debates about art. In addition to Warburg and more recent writing on Warburg and the Renaissance, readings will be drawn from an array of interdisciplinary inquiry in Classics, Medieval and East Asian fields.

Area: Humanities

Examines the involvement of prints, print culture, and the professional activity of the German painter-printmaker with the patterns of social and religious dissent, propagandizing, and political confrontation that marked the first decade of the Protestant Reformation, with a special focus on the revolutionary year 1525. Seminar includes planned visits to the print collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the National Gallery in Washington.

Area: Humanities

This seminar aims to excavate six distinct modalities of attention and attentiveness in the visual arts from Middle Ages to Modernity (cultic, narrational, speculative, ethical, sexual, and artistic). While emphasizing European developments, close consideration will be given to the role of visual attention in Hindu and Islamic visual cultures, providing the opportunity for cross-cultural comparison. Each case study will consider the historically shifting roles given to vision, cognition, imagination, affect, desire and power-knowledge in the culturally prevalent patterns of attention we study, and explore how specific kinds of pictorial schema or spatial environments served to structure and guide, or deflect and disrupt, the attention of their beholders. Finally, we will ask whether the historical study of attention can suggest analytical models or ethical lessons for the (re)mobilization of attentiveness in our own art-historical methods.

Area: Humanities

Examines major interpretations of the art and career of the great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525?-1569), with an emphasis on new approaches and research agendas. In the aftermath of the 450-year Bruegel Anniversary of 2019, with its major exhibitions and comprehensive catalogues, what comes next?

Area: Humanities

A critical interrogation of past and current interpretative approaches to the devotional arts of western Europe, c. 1300-1500.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Summer research for doctoral students