Global Arc

This seminar is devoted to this history of portraiture in the Greek and Roman world. Emphasis will be given to artistic matters as opposed to issues of identity. Many of the seminar's sessions will be held in the Princeton University Art Museum, which holds a wide variety of examples. Course will also include a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study additional works.

Antioch has been a major point of contact between the Mediterranean region and Asia from ancient times to the present. Students in this new course will get exclusive access to the artifacts and records of Princeton's Antioch excavations of the 1930s and will read and discuss sources and studies on the history of the city from its Hellenistic origins to recent activity by ISIS in the area. Attention will be paid to the city's geological setting and changes in its cultural identity and ecological environment. Each student will work on a research project, and all students will collaborate on the production of a public website about Antioch.

A topic in Chinese or Japanese art, explored in depth. For department majors, this course satisfies the Asian and East Asian cultural area and may satisfy one of the historical period distribution requirements. One three-hour seminar. Prerequisite: a course in Asian art or the instructor's permission.

Direct and regular contact between China and Europe in the early modern period brought new artistic forms and expressions to China and reconfigured the entire picture of Chinese art. Even though China appeared to have been the recipient of European art, it did not play a passive role; in fact, Chinese agents, including emperors, artists, literati, and merchants, appropriated European artistic resources according to their own agendas. This seminar will tackle the multiple dimensions of how European art worked at the Chinese imperial court and in local societies from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.

An examination of Japanese woodblock prints from the 17th through the 19th C. This seminar considers formal and technical aspects of woodblock prints, and the varied subject matter, including the "floating world" of prostitution and the theater, Japanese landscape, and burgeoning urban centers. Students explore the links between literature and prints. For department majors, this course satisfies the 1400-1800 or 1800-present distribution requirement and the Asian & East Asian cultural area. Prerequisite: one course in art history or Japanese studies, or permission of instructor. One three-hour seminar.

This course focuses on the genre of portraiture in China, examining different types of pictures, sitters, ideologies, and representations. Portraiture in China has largely been ignored or dismissed in modern critical scholarship. The tradition of portraiture, however, is both rich and varied, as evidenced by the writings of early Chinese critics and theorists as well as by the numerous terms for 'portrait' and 'portrait making' that they used. We will consider the problem of defining what a portrait is, the formal aspects of portrait making, and the questions of individuality, likeness, authenticity, and function.

The Song Dynasty has long been considered the high point of Chinese painting, representing a classical period to which later artists consistently looked back.This seminar will explore the artistic qualities and development of landscape, figure, and flower-and-bird painting and will consider main issues concerning these genres. Such issues include the relative importance of different genres, the relationship between the natural and the human world, the roles of the court and literati in producing art, and the materiality and visuality of Song painting.

Topics in medieval art and/or architecture. Prerequisite: a course in the art of this period or instructor's permission. For department majors, this course satisfies the 400-1400 historical period distribution requirement. One three-hour seminar.

Before the suppression of non-Christians in Spain and Portugal after 1492, three vibrant medieval cultures inhabited the peninsula: Muslims based in Al-Andalus, Christians based in the northern Spanish kingdoms, and Sephardic Jews throughout both realms. Their coexistence transformed their visual culture in ways that resonated well beyond Iberian borders, from Atlantic colonialism to modern identity politics. This course asks how the contacts, conflicts and compromises provoked by "living with" each other shaped artistic traditions and cultural identity in a land both enriched and destabilized by its own diversity.

Architects did not describe themselves as architects in the Renaissance. Sculptors, painters, writers, and engineers all designed buildings while simultaneously - and often primarily - focusing on other arts. What happens when a goldsmith builds a dome or an artillery engineer constructs a staircase? How does an artist's work across various media inform an architectural project, and vice-versa? Using artists including Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Rubens as case studies, this course explores the concept of the early modern multimedia architect to ask: what is architectural about architecture?