BAROQUE & ROCOCO ART & ARCHITECTURE in Spring 2025 (AH2014)

This course examines the reverberations and multi-faceted reactions to the reform movements known as the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and explores different notions of the Baroque in a global context. We will consider the art and architecture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and France, as well as the art of colonial Latin America and East Asia. Key themes and issues of consideration will include the changing role of religious images; heresy and persuasion in art; colonial art and questions of transmission, reproduction and hybridity; the rise of artists' academies and art theory; the development of genre painting; cabinets of curiosity and collecting; and eroticism, artifice and Orientalism in Rococo art and architecture.