Announcing a new course offering for Fall 2020! Professor Erin Benay will be teaching Going for Baroque: Early Modern Art in the Age of Global Expansion. 

This course explores the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era of rising nationalism, political aggrandizement, religious upheaval and extravagant art patronage through the lens of global expansion.  Artists like Caravaggio, Bernini, Velazquez, and Rembrandt negotiated emerging tensions between naturalism and idealization, court and city, public and private, and church and secular patronage.  Grand commissions vied with the new culture of open-air markets, and collectors squirreled away magnificent paintings, sculptures, and prints alongside dried specimens of natural history in their cabinets of curiosity.  These changes in artistic style, systems of patronage, and cultures of connoisseurship were further complicated by global expansion, foreign trade networks, and the establishment of Christian missions in posts from Japan to the New World.  Students will study these thematic issues across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, in an attempt to better understand the dichotomy of extravagant consumption and unmitigated brutality that prevailed at the start of the modern age.

The course is currently scheduled for Tues/Thurs from 2:30-3:45.

Requirements: A series of short reflection papers; a longer 8-10-page research paper; an in-class presentation. Graduate student requirements upon request.

Required Text: Gauvin Bailey, Baroque and Rococo (Phaidon Press, 2012) ISBN-10: 0714857424 all additional required reading will be posted to Canvas.