This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
The module examines the development of the western tradition of the visual arts from the Renaissance to the late twentieth century, looking specifically at issues about the representation of time and space in painting and related arts. The module begins with the ‘invention’ of linear and atmospheric perspective in the Renaissance and looks at the development of these compositional techniques and the tradition of visual illusion they underpin in Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th Centuries. The course looks at the theories of Alberti and Humanist writers and in particular the role played by perspective in advancing the narrative tradition of painting. The module goes on the examine the critique of the Renaissance tradition in the later 19th Century and the breaking away from the tradition of perspective in modernist painting.
2 hour lecture and 2 hour seminar
100% Coursework: 2500 word essay (35%); 3500 word essay (45%); seminar performance (20%)
L.B. Alberti, On Painting
M. Baxandall. Painting and Experience in 15th C. Italy
J. White. The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space
S. Alpers. The Art of Describing
E. Panofsky. Perspective as a Symbolic Form
M. Kemp . The Science of Art: Optical Themes in West Art, 1992
R. Shiff. Cezanne and the Ends of Impressionism
I. Stoichta. The Self-Aware Image
A. Albus. The Art of Arts
J. Shearman. Only Connect
H. Foster ed. Vision and Visuality
N. Bryson ed. Calligram
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
1. Expose students to a range of issues about the representation of time and space in art from the 15th-20th Century
2. Familiarize students with a number of influential artists on the development of the western tradition from the Renaissance to the immediate post war period, including 19th and 20th century photographers.
3. Enable students to understand the context of the development of Renaissance perspective and the differences between natural and artificial perspective.
4. Examine the relationship between painting and photography from the later 19th century to the early 20th century.
5. Develop a knowledge of subject-specific skills employed by art historians, in the analysis of visual works of art, particularly in the construction of pictorial space.
6. Develop an understanding of art history and theory’s interdisciplinary scope, and of the wide range of concepts and methods that are pursued by art historians and theorists.
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