Description

This module explores a range of the most stimulating recent scholarship on baroque art, architecture, and urbanism, mostly in Italy.  It uses carefully chosen case studies to explore particularly interesting problems in baroque art. It includes an exploration of the promise, limits and potential of the term ‘baroque’ in light of long-standing conceptions, brilliant insights (eg Walter Benjamin) and recent theorizations (Gilles Deleuze) of the term for the study of history of art and architecture. It engages with the term stylistically, thematically and theoretically; but the module is not at all intended to ‘cover’ all art that has been termed ‘baroque’, nor even to introduce students to ‘typical’ baroque art. Rather it encourages critical resistance to the widespread tendency to collapse style into chronological period and vice versa.

Instead, the module is formed in terms of case studies to allow detailed, critical examination and imaginative exploration of carefully selected problems, themes, and art works from seventeenth-century Italy in light of important and recent scholarship.  It is conceived to interrogate notions of chronicity and temporality and to encourage students to work with complex conceptions of historical time rather than adopt easy periodization. Thus we will consider issues such as the relationship between materiality and redemption; chronology and ruination; violence and the sacred; the role of the relic; witness and martyrdom; and the dead /sexualised saint through precise instances, buildings, and artworks.

Objectives

At the end of this module students will have acquired:

• a critical and detailed knowledge of several major art works of seventeenth century Italy
• an awareness of the complex relationship between ‘period’ and ‘style’ in relation to ‘baroque’ and seventeenth-century Italian visual culture
• a critical awareness of key debates in the study of seventeenth-century Italian visual culture
• a critical ability to consider specific case studies of art and architecture in relation to recent scholarly interventions and debates

Preliminary Reading

Download the Preliminary Reading list: Critical Approaches to the Baroque (PDF , 242kb)