SOS: Renaissance Italy as a Case Study for Aesthetic Theory

This student-originated study is designed for students with some background in aesthetic theory or art history. Its aims are twofold: first, to examine the fraught and complex relationships between art and its conditions of production, and, second, to take this as an opportunity to become oriented to this crucial period in the history of western art. Students will read arguments to the effect that aesthetic theory itself, as a distinct philosophical preoccupation, arises just then, a new age giving rise to new needs that call forth not only a new art but a concomitant way of thinking about art, i.e., art that requires thinking as its complement.

Alongside student-selected scholarly articles, students will read excerpts from Vasari’s Lives of Painters, Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy, Summers’ The Judgments of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics, and E. H. Gombrich on Norms and Forms; Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. The primary modes of engagement will be student-run seminars, research projects, and art history presentations.