Course description

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the term ‘art’ covered a field far broader than the ‘fine arts’ or ‘visual arts’ do in modern usage. The Renaissance ‘artist’, understood in broad contemporary terms, occupied a central place in the cultural landscape in which the manual or ‘mechanical’ arts (typically the domain of the ‘artisan’) met the liberal arts and shaded off into the natural sciences. This Option offers students an opportunity to explore this unfamiliar landscape, with a particular focus on the many ways in which the ‘arts’ developed new means of understanding and intervening in the world of nature. This is a world in which artists rose from the company of artisans and craftsmen on the strength of new techniques for imitating nature, where artist-engineers invented machines and perfected the arts of war, where astronomers joined forces with sailors to improve the art of navigation, where mathematical practitioners of great variety devised instruments which triggered major intellectual breakthroughs, where new species flooding in from the new world raised hopes of perfecting the art of medicine, where alchemists and natural magicians sought new arts to manipulate the deepest hidden forces of nature, and where iconic figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Paracelsus rub shoulders with nameless tradesmen.

In addition to representative contemporary texts from across Europe, students will be exposed to a rich variety of visual sources, from classic works by major Renaissance artists to maps, charts, instruments, machines, and the wonderful natural and artificial objects avidly collected by princes and patricians in this period. No technical or special linguistic background will be assumed.
 

Image note. This trompe-l'oeil painting representing a cabinet of curiosities blurs the boundary between real and fictitious space. Trompe-l'oeil, the French term for "eye-deceiver," is a modern word for an old phenomenon: a three-dimensional "perception" provoked by a flat surface, for a puzzling moment of insecurity and reflection. The early precursors of modern trompe l'oeil appeared during the Renaissance, with the discovery of mathematically correct perspective. But the fooling of the eye to the point of confusion with reality only emerged with the rise of still-life painting in the Netherlands in the 17th century. Though highly esteemed by collectors, from the beginning art theorists often dismissed trompe-l'oeil as the lowest category of art, seeing it as a mere technical tour-de-force that did not require invention or intellectual thought. In the 17th century, trompe-l'oeil masters were not only receiving praise and recognition from many quarters but also pushing the boundaries of the genre. Domenico Remps, a painter of German origin, active in Italy, was a master of this genre. Source: Web Gallery of Art