************************************************************ ARTH310: Painting and Presence Theory of the Image, 1350-1550 12:40-2:10 TR
[email protected] office hours: MWF noon-3 p.m. TR 8-10 a.m. and by appointment ************************************************************ The Goal: “Als Ich Kan” (As I Can: the best that I can) reads the top of the painting’s frame. Who, or what, is the I? And what is it that it is striving to do? A clue in the words at the bottom: “Jan van Eyck made me Year 1433 21 October.” So is it the painting that speaks? Or perhaps the Man in the Red Turban whose penetrating stare holds us? What does it mean for a painting to speak, to be present? What does it mean for a face, a person, an identity to be present through painting? This course seeks to understand painting’s ability to evoke presence in the late Middle Ages. How does it do so? Whose presence? What are the differences between divine and human presence? These questions are pressing in this period of theological controversy (the rise of Protestantism and the defense of Catholicism), artistic innovation (the emergence of portraiture and oil painting), and scientific discovery (the adaptation of perspective and the camera obscura). We will consider the roles that materiality, perspective, ritual, devotion, salvation, originality, verisimilitude and beauty played in this chapter of the history of the image – a chapter that our modern desires for authenticity in art indicate is still being written. Together, we will explore and analyze the theory of the image in its haunting and lasting ability to make the absent present, the invisible visible, and the abstract available.