An introduction to selected periods and works of art and architecture from the Renaissance to the present as well as an introduction to the discipline of art history. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The course provides a general introduction to Roman art. It discusses various artistic media--portraiture, historical relief, etc.--and highlights important works.

ART 205 explores the conceptual character of medieval European art from late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages with an emphasis on methodological, historiographical, and theoretical issues. Using selected monuments and objects from a wide geographical range and dating from the 4th to the 14th centuries as case studies, students will familiarize with the methodological developments of art historical research. The course will particularly focus on the "anthropological turn" of medieval art history and medieval image theory.

"Between Renaissance and Revolution: Baroque and Rococo Art in Europe." Painting and sculpture in Europe from the 1580s to the 1790s. The great figures (e.g. Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velazquez, Bernini, et. al.) major artistic innovations (still life, genre, landscape), and stylistic developments (e.g. rococo, Neoclassicism) seen in relation to intellectual, political, religious, and social change. The preceptorials will concentrate on the study of actual works of art in the museum in Princeton and elsewhere.

A broad study of nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture created in the void left by the collapse of Ancient Regime religious and governmental patronage. The century's range of artistic roles will be examined, including the artist as revolutionary, entrepreneur, isolated genius, and impassive observer. The century's formative movements and major artists, such as Goya, Canova, Delacroix, Turner, Courbet, Rodin, Monet, and Van Gogh, will be discussed.

A critical study of the major movements, paradigms, and documents of modernist art from the Post-Impressionism to the "Degenerate" art show. Among our topics: primitivism, abstraction, collage, the readymade, machine aesthetics, photographic reproduction, the art of the insane, artists in political revolution, anti-modernism. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Introduces students to arts of Japan from ca.1200 through 1830's by examining major monuments available in Japan and abroad. In-depth analysis of individual objects through slides in lectures. Syllabi notes essential to the schedule for the course. Reference to social and cultural histories of Japan are frequently made, particularly with reference to China. Beneficial to students in East Asian Studies program.

An analysis of the emergence of modern architecture from the late nineteenth century to World War II, in light of new methodologies. It will focus not only on major monuments but also on issues of gender, class and ethnicity so as to cover the experience of modernity from a more pluralist point of view.

A survey of photography from its multiple inventions in the early nineteenth century to its omnipresence (and possible obsolescence) in the twenty-first. Themes will include photography's power to define the "real;" its emulation and eventual transformation of the traditional fine arts; and its role in the construction of personal and collective memories. Precepts will meet in the Photographic Study Room of the Princeton Art Museum to study original images.

In China, Japan, the Islamic world, and several other cultures, writing is ranked as the highest of the visual arts, far above painting, sculpture, even architecture. The forms taken by beautiful writing are at least as diverse as the writing systems that underlie them: think of Egyptian writing, Chinese calligraphy, Roman monumental inscriptions. This course will introduce the world's major calligraphic traditions and examine the functions of beautiful writing, the reasons for its existence and prestige, and the factors that shape styles of writing. The university art museum has major works of Maya and Chinese calligraphy that we will study.

This course explores the visual and archaeological world of ancient Mesoamerica, from the first arrival of humans in the area until the era of Spanish invasion in the early 16th century. Major culture groups to be considered include Olmec, Maya, and Aztec. Preceptorial sections will consist of a mix of theoretically-focused discussions, debate regarding opposing interpretations in scholarship, and hands-on work with objects in the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Examination of images of myths on pottery and in sculpture that are expressive of social content often quite different from literary forms of the myths; tracing the changing meaning of myths through time from the 7th century B.C. to the Hellenistic Period (1st century B.C.).

To understand Man's changing interpretations of Nature as seen in gardens and landscape architecture, pastoral poetry, and landscape painting.

This course provides an introduction to the history of American art from around 1900 to the present day and investigates various manifestations or articulations of the modern, modernism, and modernity within artistic practices of this time. Attention will be paid to the role of European art and artists in the development of modern art in the United States and to the manner in which this development intersects with other cultural spheres, including politics, science, and literature.

Course focuses on the production and reception of art in the Federal Republic of Germany from circa 1960 to now, situating episodes in the history of painting, sculpture, and photography in relation to developments in literature and cinema. Topics include: the problem of coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung); the West German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) and the functions and meanings of art in consumer society; violence, politics, sexuality, and representation; abstraction and figuration in painting, sculpture, and photography; history, memory, and artistic tradition; art as a vehicle of sociopolitical critique.

In antiquity, magic is a pervasive phenomenon. The course will trace its development in the Greek, Etruscan and Roman worlds. The Nether World, an oracle of the dead, and witchcraft will come into the picture. Furthermore, marriage-related and salvation-oriented magic will be dealt with, as well as a Greek Book of Dreams and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Participants are expected to show lively interest in the topic, engage in discussions, and do investigative reading. Texts and images will be kept in balance.

The seminar will examine 10 great handscrolls from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that are masterpieces of the art of story-telling. The scrolls will be examined in the cultural context of Imperial Mythology, Buddhist Temple Myths, Priestly Hagiology, Courtly Literature, and Legend and Battle Tales.

The focus of the seminar will be G.B. Piranesi (1720-1778), as architect, antiquarian, polemicist, dealer, and graphic artist. We will endeavor to see Piranesi in context, to understand his accomplishment against the background of his adopted city and the learned culture that flourished there. Piranesi's publications are well represented in Princeton collections, providing opportunities for those who wish to work closely with original sources.

Print Cultures. Seminar attends to the forms and content of printed images in Europe between 1450-1800. Focus is upon the conceptual, social, and economic facets of print communication through examination and analysis of period engraving, etchings, woodcuts. Attention directed towards specific techniques, as well as the historical modalities of print's reception. Topics include: the collecting, copyright, and marketing of print, Protestant-Catholic propaganda, print and identity formation, cartography, documentation of the New World, demarcations of high/low culture, the historical agency of mass-produced media.

Ludic Strategies in the Postwar Context - This course considers art practices of the late 20th century in light of international and cross-disciplinary explosion of texts on and about play, beginning with translations of Huizinga's Homo Ludens, Caillois' Man, Play and Games and Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. This same period saw the rise of art practices emphasizing process, indeterminacy, the unforeseeable and the interactive - all hallmarks of the ephemeral and contingent ludic. Artists include: Fahlstrom, LeWitt, Acconci, Calle, Maciunas, Lygia Clark, the Situationist International.

Better than almost any other campus, Princeton tells the story of American architectural history from the colonial period to the present. This course puts Princeton in the larger context of campus design in the Anglo-American world and considers how architecture reflects changing educational ideals. Eighteenth-century austerity and nineteenth-century eclecticism were pushed aside in the 1890s by Collegiate Gothic. Since 1970, the campus has become a proving ground for some of America's most innovative architects. Architectural controversies will be emphasized. Walking tours and visits to Mudd Library.

Organized around a set of topoi--medium, apparatus, dispositif, Kunstwollen, symbolische Form, Pathosformel, aura--that raise key historical and theoretical issues for the conceptualization of art and media as such, this seminar will undertake a series of close readings of selected canonical art media theory texts.

The narrative of heroic and divine myth is the essential vehicle of Greek and Roman expression; it defines classical culture more than anything else. The technique of ancient narrative has been investigated extensively but not the reasons for the choice of this expressive medium. The course will examine emulation as a Graeco-Roman cultural imperative.

The medieval image and concepts of authenticity- The course examines the notion of the authentic in conjunction with medieval images. It investigates the construction, reception, and theoretical grounding of authenticity of reliquaries, icons, and imprints on cloth or seals. These objects elucidate the shift from mimesis toward other artistic strategies (stylization, abstraction, bricolage). Rather than studying different modes of representation, we will focus on the very validity of representation in the Middle Ages and approach this issue from the viewpoints of history, anthropology, philology and visual studies.

Global Art History - Art has a place as well as time. This course examines the geography of art. The first part of the class will discuss the historiography and theory of artistic geography. The main focus of the class is on the possibilities of global art history.

The First Pop Age - "We have already entered the Second Machine Age," Reyner Banham writes in "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age" (1960), "and can look back on the First as a period of the past." Might we say a similar thing today of "The First Pop Age", the age of the Independent Group in London and Andy Warhol and friends in New York? We will look closely at the work of the most innovative of these artists (among them Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist, Richter, and Ruscha), the ones that invented new models of the pictorial image, but other figures will be considered as well.

Song-Yuan Painting. Issues in the history of Chinese painting, 10th to 14th centuries, from the rise of landscape painting to the rise of literati painting style.

The topic will be the historiography of Chinese bronzes, with particular focus on the application of western art-historical methods to ancient non-western material culture.

A study of major Islamic capitals, including Baghdad, Cordoba, Isfahan, Samarqand, and others. Course will focus on problems of their history, town planning, and importance as centers of Islamic art. Specific topics will vary from year to year.