The Work of Art c.1550-c.1750: Redeeming Matter

Overview

How do you think that works of art ‘work’? This aspect of art is often taken for granted. Students often assume it is simply a matter of ‘each viewer having their own individual response’. But this assumption is too hasty and assumes too much. How is that response elicited and how does it in turn inform an interpretation of the artwork? In what ways are interpretations constrained by artworks?

This module is designed to investigate how art works work. It does so by focusing on artworks mostly made between ca.1550 and ca.1750 in Europe and beyond. Those artworks range from beautiful Renaissance altarpieces by Mantegna to explosive baroque female convent churches to silver reliquaries to aristocratic dress and even to basket making and Inka stonework.

We will explore together the ways in which the materiality of art works was (& is) made to matter. While it is often assumed that ‘materiality’ is mere matter- and thus the identification of an artwork as ‘embossed silver’ or ‘oil painting’ or ‘stone, stucco and gilded wood’ is all that is required, this module will vastly expand – if not explode—such a conception!

Likewise the spiritual work that art and architecture participated in and produced is also under investigation in this module. After all, what mattered more to people than their spiritual redemption? How is this spiritual mattering related to artistic mattering? How were the relationships between materiality and spirituality re-imagined, explored, redefined, and contested in this period?

The module focuses in particular on Italian art, but asks what part did ‘place’ play in this relationship?  By taking seriously both the matter and the work that art does, this module challenges prevailing conventional assumptions within much art history.  Thus it equips students to think critically about artworks of any point of manufacture – geographically or chronologically—while offering very specific insights into the ways in which architecture, sculpture, reliquaries, fashion, and metalwork of baroque Europe were made to ‘matter’—beyond the merely technical.

Aims

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• a critical awareness of materiality and the spiritual economy of art in Europe, particularly in Italy c1550-c1750
• a critical knowledge of the main debates in investigating the relationships between matter, form, and holiness
• an ability to critically explore concepts of spirituality and holiness in relation to specific works of art
• a critical knowledge of matter and materiality in early modern visual culture
• afamiliarity with important and beautiful works of baroque art  and architecture

Outline

Possible seminar outline:

• The Spritual Economy and the Matter of Place
• Gendering matter and gendering sanctity
• Ecstasy and Intimacy: Ecstatic Aesthetics
• Relics and reliquaries: The Matter of Miracles
• Civic Ritual Reconsidered: Pilgrimage and Holy Bodies
• Acting out the Passion: Tears, Touch & Sacri Monti
• Clouds and Shadows: visions of the divine
• The Architecture of Incarnation: ruins and revelation
• Catacomb to Confessio: locating the martyr’s body
• Miraculous Images: Weeping Madonnas & Speaking Statues
• The Repulsive Body: Torture and Triumph in Seventeenth-Century Naples

Preliminary reading

• Todd Olson, ‘Pitiful Relics: Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St Matthew’, Representations, Vol.77, Winter 2002, pp.107-42.
• Lorenzo Pericolo, ‘Visualizing Appearance and Disappearance: On Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus, Art Bull, 2007, LXXXIX, n.3 , pp.519-539.
• Eric R. Koch, The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008.
• Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence. A History if the image before the era of art, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, (1990).
• JB Scott, Architecture for the Shroud: Relic and Ritual in Turin, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003, pp.1-37, 89-117.
• Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a stain)’, October, vol 29, 1984, 63-81
• Tobias Kämpf, ‘Framing Cecilia’s Sacred Body: Paolo Camillo Sfondrato and the Language of Revelation’, The Sculpture Journal, 6, 2001, pp.10-20.
• Steven Ostrow, Art & Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome: The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Maggiore, CUP: New York & Cambridge, 1996.
• F. Barry, ‘Roman Apartheid? The Counter-Reformation Ghettoes’, Daidalos, March 1996, n.59, pp.18-31
• Julia L Hairston & Walter Stephens (eds), The Body in Early Modern Italy, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 249-274
• Rose Marie San Juan, Rome. A City Out of Print, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2001,
• Edwin Muir, Civic Ritual, London, 1990.
• Edward Casey, The Sense of Place, New York., 1998
• Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art, London: Reaktion Books, 1995
• Jennifer Montagu, Gold, Silver &Bronze. Metal Sculpture of the Roman Baroque, Princetonm: Princeton UP, 1990, Cap. 3,