Description

The semblance of art and reality was a recurring concern for seventeenth-century artists and theorists. Consequently, art historians have long tried to grapple with what has been variously termed the “life-like effect”, “photographic quality”, “verisimilitude”, “illusionism” and “optical trickery” of seventeenth-century painting and sculpture. “Realism” is always a relative term, because its meaning is informed by the practices of a specific culture. This module will engage with the important methodological problems that surround the privileged explanatory category of “realism” for seventeenth-century painting and sculpture in Europe.

We will investigate the wide variety of pictorial, thematic and conceptual strategies in close relation to contemporary texts and modern, scholarly theoretical writings. Seminars will focus on groups of images and topics such as Sanctity and Reality in Spanish Polychrome Sculpture, The Grotesque Body in Dutch Peasant Imagery, Art and Optics in Samuel Hoogstraten’s Peepbox and Scientific and Anatomical Studies of the Human Body, Flora and Fauna.

Objectives

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• familiarity with major artists and artistic genres in seventeenth-century Europe
• an appreciation of the historical relativity of the “real” in different societies in early modern Europe
• knowledge of a range of methodological approaches that have been applied to the ‘veristic appeal’ of seventeenth-century painting and sculpture and an ability to critique those methodologies

Preliminary Reading

• Bray, X. (et. al.), The Sacred Made Real. Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700, ex. cat. National Gallery, London 2009.
• Alcolea, S., Zurbarán, Barcelona 2008.
• Varriano, John L., Caravaggio: The Art of Realism, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 2006.
• Goldgar, A., 'Nature as Art: The case of Tulips', in P. H. Smith and P. Findlen (ed.), Merchants and marvels: commerce, science and art in early modern Europe, London, 2002, pp. 324-346.
• Bakhtin, M. M. [1941, 1965] Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, 1993.