Learn to Look: ART 105 This fall

The Department of Art invites you to enroll in Art 105 Introduction to the History of Art and Architecture. The flagship course of the art history division of our Department, it is team taught with our faculty lecturing on their areas of expertise. Smaller conference sections meet once a week in the classroom and galleries of the Lehman Loeb Art Center. The course draws on the collections of the Art Center and emphasizes direct engagement with works of art in diverse media. This museum environment is the teaching laboratory for Art 105.

Art 105 has a rich legacy and it is as an essential component of undergraduate education at Vassar. Its scope is ambitious and wide-ranging: to present episodes and periods of artistic transformation across cultures and geographies, from the ancient world to the early modern period associated with the Renaissance. Although primarily chronological in structure, the course addresses larger conceptual categories that both unify and complicate the relation of the visual arts to cultural and social change. In addition, it employs recent and evolving techniques of the digital humanities in presenting visual material to the class.

Among its many themes, the course explores the varying formations of sacred space and the physical embodiments of the divine throughout the history of world religions. Narrative strategies in the visual arts are examined in depth, from monumental sculptural and fresco cycles to illuminated manuscripts and handscrolls. The commemorative imaging of identity and likeness in both elite and non-elite society is a recurrent and primary theme of the course, as is the creative and destructive dialogue between the natural world and the built environment. Revolutions in image production, from stained glass to print technology, are especially important. Our hope is that you will learn to look closely and critically at art objects as tangible expressions of human experience amid the vicissitudes of historical change. Department-sponsored field trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be scheduled in conjunction with the course. MWF noon-12:50 1 fifty-minute conference section per week at the Loeb Art Center.