ARTH 400 Advanced Seminar in Art Historical Method: Art & Ritual in Late Medieval & Renaissance Europe

• Wednesdays, 15:00-17:30
• EV-3-760
• Instructor: Dr. Steven Stowell

In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe, visual images and decorative objects often played important roles in many formalized rituals. Images were not simply appreciated for their visual qualities, rather they were prominently featured, touched, handled, gifted, dressed, and honored in sometimes complex social or private rituals. Indeed, the ritual was often a spectacle in itself, in which the use of images and decorative objects were fundamental to the creation of the ritual moment. To understand the historical meanings of images and art objects, therefore, it is important to have a strong understanding of the rituals for which they were created. The study of ritual and art also raises a number of important questions: how did art objects augment rituals? What can the meanings of a ritual tell us about the meaning of a work of art? To what extent can the work of art be separated from its ritual context? This course will explore these questions and other across a range of rituals in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, with particular emphasis on the arts in Italy; anthropological theories of rituals will be introduced and discussed in order to gain insight on the European context. Some of the themes this course will cover include: the ritual calendar and the relationship between art and the marking of time; rituals and the demarcation of social spaces; devotional rituals and art; rituals of gift giving; rituals of magic; meditative rituals.