ArtH 303-001 The Image Worlds of Late Antiquity
[General Honors]
A. Kuttner
T-Th 12-1:30 Jaffe 201
Ancient Rome literally constructed a national and
imperial identity with images and patterned spaces. When Constantine
in 313 inaugurated a Christian Empire, and made a New Rome
in the East, the empire's rulers
and inhabitants continued to care about their social
and national identity as a Roman identity, even as they sought to innovate
in style and content on the Graeco-Roman artistic heritage and to make
new myths
of Christian Rome - all the more as the empire itself
confronted old and new military challenges on every frontier.
Contextualizing art and architecture in the Late Antique voices of historians
and prelates, poets
and philosophers, we look at how Roman Late
Antiquity carried on its rich projects of visual culture west and
east, to found by imitation and reaction the Medieval, Byzantine
and Islamic cultures that have
shaped the modern "Western" and Mediterranean world.
Looking at sarcophagi and portraits, arches and coins, mosaics, frescoes
and painted books, luxury arts like silverware and carved ivory,
our course topics range over the art and artistic image of Old and New
Rome (Constantinople), at palaces, villas, and imperial capitals
from Trier and Ravenna to Antioch and Damascus, at
the decoration of sacred,imperial and civic space with old and new forms
of commemorative and historical art, the contested status of the
image itself, and at the
Late Antique vitality of now-ancient "pagan" themes,
"classical" styles, and Graeco-Roman aesthetics.
Registration: 25, by permission of the instructor
[akuttner@sas.upenn.edu]. No prerequisites.
Of especial interest to History of Art, History and Ancient History, Classical,
Religious and Ancient and Medieval Studies.
BACK
TO ARTH 301 303