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To study fundamental and recurring themes in art and the historiography of art from the middle ages to the modern period.
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This year, the general theme will be “art and knowledge”. The first part of the course also forms part of the Technical Art History programme of the University of Amsterdam, and will be coordinated by Sven Dupré. The focus of this part of the course will be Light, Color and Perspective in Art.
The application of linear perspective in early fifteenth-century Italian painting is considered a defining moment in the history of art. The seminar re-examines the historiography of perspective developed since Erwin Panofsky’s ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’. On the basis of the analysis of works of art and contemporaneous writings we study perspective as practice (instead of symbolic form). The seminar also broadens the scope of investigation towards the study of color, light and shadow, which have only more recently gained sustained attention, opening up connections to technical art history. One of the central question we are concerned with is whether and in which ways the practice of perspective, light and color in the arts is related to bodies of optical, mathematical and philosophical knowledge.
The second part of the course will be coordinated by Thijs Weststeijn, and will consider broader issues in the relation between art and knowledge.
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