B5352 - Premodern and Early Modern Art: Global Perspectives in Curatorial Practices (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

Students learn to interpret premodern and early modern art between the 14th and 18th centuries using methodological tools that question the "Global Renaissance." Beyond Eurocentric approaches, the course focuses on the challenges and applications of methods, theories, and concepts, connecting art histories through global perspectives and addressing cultural transformations and diverse historiographical approaches in curatorial practices.

Course contents

The course focuses on interpretative views applied to premodern art history in thought-provoking/groundbreaking exhibitions and catalogues.

Students can thus familiarize themselves with the major perspectives and challenging topics that have engaged curators and specialists in the last decades, dealing with a sensitive plurality of contexts and cultural geographies. Through discussions and case studies, students can prove different critical paths, going beyond stylistic influence and center/periphery paradigms through artistic circulation to connected and rhizomatic histories. The course considers how ideologies, authoritative canons, racialization/stigmatization, imperialism, and colonialism have been the core forces behind collecting, trade, and the acknowledgment of aesthetic value, as well as museums’ storytelling and catalogs narratives.

The course explores the Mediterranean Renaissance and Global Renaissance/Baroque by offering insights into intertwining key thematic issues: Global Catholicism, propaganda, power strategies, transformation of models, distributed agency, artistic migration, borderlands/disconnected paths, constellations/networks, wars anxiety, climate crisis, religious changes, political sovereignty, moral authority, and social emotions. Through the study of specific exhibitions, catalogues, and seminal essays/research projects, the course reframes curatorial practices, considering paintings but also prints, early modern illustrated books, devotional objects, maps, folding screens, and other pivotal materials in Europe and the Americas.

Schedule

The course consists of meetings/lectures focusing on relevant themes and cutting-edge approaches. We analyze the choices and questions raised by innovative or controversial recent exhibitions and studies. The course may host guest scholars and enlightening talks.

Broad topics:

1. Microcosms and the quest for connections

- Mediterranean Renaissance, routes, commodities exchanges;

- microhistory, center/periphery, polycentric monarchies;

- connected histories, rhizomatic histories, artistic circulation;

2. Transatlantic images and Latin American art

- distributed agency, networks, communities, biopolitics;

- transformations of models/canons, travelling prints;

- Global Renaissance, Global Baroque, Iberian Americas;

3. Moving

- conversion, evangelization, missionary horizons;

- Global Catholicism, cults and geographies, female sanctity;

- emblem books, ideology of Salvation, authorities;

4. Exploring

- history of emotions, consent/dissent, morality;

- climate imperialism, environmental art history;

- materiality, temporality, collective creativity;

5. Challenging

- race and racialization, encounters/clashes of cultures;

- decolonizing art history, whiteness in museums;

- maps/colonialism, rarities/collecting, object-based studies.

Readings/Bibliography

Students need to choose and study two volumes from those listed. However, please also skim the other books/essays (catalog entries and selected chapters/excerpts). This way, students can reach an extensive view of the issues tackled during the course by connecting and discussing more cases and images/works during the final oral exam. Additional specialized essays regarding engaging studies may be recommended and made available during the course as optional/alternative resources to explore specific topics. Non-attending students study two books and scan a third volume, freely chosen from the sections (A, B, C, D, E) below.

A. Methodological Perspectives/Tools

Serge Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Polity press, 2014).

Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

Space and Conversion in Global Perspective, ed. by Giuseppe Marcocci, Wietse de Boer, Aliocha Maldavsky, and Ilaria Pavan (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015).

Collecting and Empires, an Historical and Global Perspective: The Impact of the Creation and Dissolution of Empires on Collections and Museums from Antiquity to the Present, ed. by Maia Wellington Gahtan and Eva-Maria Troelenberg (London; Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2019).

Giuseppe Marcocci, The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires (1565-1898), ed. by Florina H. Capistrano-Baker and Meha Priyadarshini (Makati City, Philippines: Ayala Foundation; Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute; Florence: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut, 2020).

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Connected History: Essays and Arguments, expanded ed. (London: Verso, 2022).

Eloquent Images: Evangelisation, Conversion and Propaganda in the Global World of the Early Modern Period, ed. by Giuseppe Capriotti, Pierre-Antoine Fabre, and Sabina Pavone (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022).

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B. Entering Colonial Latin American Worlds

The Arts in Latin America 1492–1820, ed. by Joseph J. Rishel with Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, ed. by Ilona Katzew; with an introduction by William B. Taylor and essays by Luisa Elena Alcalá and others (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011)

Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790, ed. by Ilona Katzew; with essays and entries by exhibition co-curators Jaime Cuadriello, Paula Mues Orts, and Luisa Elena Alcalá (Munich, London, New York: DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2017)

Return Journey: Art of the Americas in Spain, ed. by Rafael J. López Guzmán (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2021).

Archive of the World, Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800: Highlights from LACMA’s Collection, ed. by Ilona Katzew; with contributions by Pablo F. Amador Marrero, Rafael Barrientos Martínez, Patricia Díaz Cayeros, Carlos F. Duarte, Clarissa M. Esguerra, Cristina Esteras Martín, Alejandra Mayela Flores Enríquez, Aaron M. Hyman, Rachel Kaplan, Paula Mues Orts, Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Elena Phipps, Joanna M. Reyes, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Edward J. Sullivan, and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden (Los Angeles: LACMA; New York: DelMonico Books, 2022).

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C. Connecting Global Renaissances

Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. by Jay A. Levenson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/circa-1492.pdf

Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. by Claire Farago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

The Age of van Eyck: The Mediterranean World and Early Netherlandish Painting: 1430–1530, ed. by Till-Holger Borchert (Ghent; Amsterdam: Ludion, 2002).

Asia & Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850, ed. by Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2009).

Barry Flood, David Joselit, Alexander Nagel, Alessandra Russo, Eugene Wang, Christopher Wood, and Mimi Yiengpruksawan. “Roundtable: The Global Before Globalization.” October 133 (2010): 3–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40926714

Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, ed. by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014).

Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, ed. by Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane (München: Hirmer, 2015).

The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, ed. by Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London; New York: Routledge, 2016).

The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, ed. by Daniel Savoy (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017).

Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s “Nova Reperta”, ed. by Lia Markey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020). https://dcc.newberry.org/?p=14403

Claudia Swan, Rarities of these Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021).

The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art, ed. by Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porras (New York; London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024). https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003294986/routledge-companion-global-renaissance-art-stephen-campbell-stephanie-porras

You have download and read online access. This content is Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

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D. Printed Views and Transformative Images

Walter S. Melion, The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625 (Philadelphia, PA: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2009).

Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Image, Materiality, Space, ed. by Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward H. Wouk (London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017).

The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art, ed. by Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2018).

Aaron M. Hyman, Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2021).

Prints as Agents of Global Exchange, 1500–1800, ed. by Heather Madar (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021).

Paper Knives, Paper Crowns: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic, ed. by Maureen Warren (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2022).

Stephanie Porras, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023).

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E. Forging Otherness and its Imagery

Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750; Visual Imagery Before Orientalism, ed. by James G. Harper (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, ed. by Joaneath Ann Spicer (Baltimore, MD: Walters Art Museum, 2012). https://thewalters.org/wp-content/uploads/revealing-the-african-presence-in-renaissance-europe.pdf

Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia, ed. by Stephanie Schrader (Los Angeles, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013).

Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, ed. by Pamela A. Patton (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016).

Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Erin Kathleen Rowe, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Black in Rembrandt’s Time, ed. by Elmer Kolfin and Epco Runia (Zwolle, Amsterdam: WBOOKS; The Rembrandt House Museum, 2020).

Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World, ed. by Noémie Ndiaye and Lia Markey (Tempe, Arizona: ACMRS Press, 2023).

https://digital.newberry.org/rb4r/

 https://asu.pressbooks.pub/seeing-race-before-race/front-matter/contents/

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Teaching methods

The course consists of readings, in-depth lectures, and discussions of case studies, exhibition catalogues, and research international projects regarding curatorial practices and collections. The course may include short videos, digital exhibitions, and databases to consult and analyze. These resources regard the Ibero-American paintings and printed traveling images. The course addresses the macro-themes and paths mentioned above in the schedule and bibliography sections.

Assessment methods

During the oral final exam, students demonstrate the acquired knowledge and methodological/critical ability to connect different materials and cultural geographies through an overall discourse that embraces the issues addressed in the course by making cross-references to case studies and related works. Students thus can imagine being appointed as curators of an exhibition, explaining their choices of objects/artworks and the desired scope of their curatorial concept. They can illustrate their ideas through a PowerPoint or by building their personal “atlas of images.” Students are encouraged to participate actively.

Teaching tools

Projection of PowerPoints; audiovisual resources (from seminars and interviews); databases (digital humanities).

Office hours

See the website of Maria Vittoria Spissu