Modules

Understanding Space in Renaissance Italy (AHV3002)

15 credits

The course focuses on the meaning and function of space in art, architecture and urbanism in Renaissance Italy, and especially in Florence (c. 1300-1600). Space has emerged in recent scholarship on the arts in the Early Modern period as key concept for understanding the relationships between objects and their contemporary viewers. A wide range of objects, from private devotional paintings for domestic use to vast public buildings, served key functions in the fashioning of identities, familial, local and collective. Inspired in part by Henri Lefebvre’s influential discussion of The Production of Space (1974), we will consider such issues as the ways that pictorial form codifies relationships within the field of a painting and with its intended viewers, and how public sculpture and monumental architecture operate in the urban public realm.