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An introduction to the study of art, architecture, and material culture from a global perspective, including Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Organized around themes, parallels and connections will be drawn between artistic objects and buildings from across history and around the world. Case studies consider art and architecture’s relationship to religion, monarchy, colonialism, indigeneity, missionization, cultural appropriation, commodification, and self-representation. Others will consider medium, technique, perspective, composition, and art’s relationship to narrative and meditation. 

[Note: Effective 2024-2025, both ARTH121 and ARTH122 replace ARTH120 as required courses for all ARTH plans. Students must take EITHER ARTH121 or ARTH122 to declare an ARTH plan, and BOTH must be completed in order to graduate with an ARTH plan. Students are advised to take both in their first year.]

By examining the variety and complexity of Renaissance art, from Michelangelo's muscular giants to Bosch's perversely playful monsters, this course explores how Renaissance artists and their patrons understood what it means to be human and how they imagined in new ways God, Heaven, Hell, and angels (genderless and bodiless beings). By discussing both such famous works as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and such little-known ones as prints of witches, we will study ideals of gender, constructions of power, and depictions of marginalized peoples. 

This course aims to present an introduction to the arts and visual culture of the African peoples, encompassing traditional or classic African arts, as well as modern and contemporary African arts. Through theoretical and practical analysis, students will be encouraged to reflect on how the African art field has been shaped by scholars, curators, artists and public interaction.

The Baroque era (c.1580 – c.1800) produced the first truly global arts style. Its greatest artists, from the controversial Caravaggio to the consummate courtier Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, focused more intensely on the viewer than ever before. Baroque art was the product of a world in crisis very like our own, with wars, plagues, power struggles, human trafficking, and colonialism. This course will explore Baroque art in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

How can we trace a global history of design through women’s work? What was the place of women in design? How was design made to be gendered? How did it depend on colonialism? How can marginalization and oppression be challenged and subverted through design? This course considers these questions through an exploration of the relationship between identity, place, and design (i.e., architecture, interiors, furniture, textiles, fashion, and material culture).

Today we are experiencing a reassessment of the modern, western landscape and the ideals of progress that underlie it. This course will examine landscape design in the 20th and 21st centuries, including western and non-western approaches, looking at public spaces, places of leisure, suburban yards, and more.

Angels and demons, saints and sinners, kings and popes, the Romanesque era, like our own, was full of conflicting forces that affected people’s everyday lives.  As increasing food supplies and wealth altered society, individuals and communities turned to the visual languages of power around them to define and legitimize their place in this wild world.  Looking at a variety of media including architecture, sculpture, and manuscript painting, this course examines how different communities in the central Middle Ages absorbed and altered elements of past and contemporary cultures of power to fashion their own statements of presence, vision, and magnificence.

This course examines connections between art, art history and intersectional feminisms from the 1960s to the present day. Weekly classes are organized thematically to introduce you to many of the key issues and critical frameworks that have informed diverse, transnational feminist approaches to art and art history, and to give you an understanding that this is a varied and sometimes conflicting field of cultural production that is still being shaped and debated today.

A study of the arts and visual culture of the Indigenous peoples of the northern circumpolar region encompassing Alaska, Canada and Greenland, with a main focus on Dorset, Thule and post-1950 Inuit arts. Students will examine the development of modern Inuit art markets, including reception, promotion and circulation in the south.

This course examines the ways in which visual images can function as a form of social, political, or religious propaganda. With reference to examples produced from the early modern period to the present, it will deal with a variety of media: from fine art paintings to political posters, cartoons, video games, etc. Offered by Arts and Science Online.

This course examines the city—past, present, and future—and its ability to be ecologically sustaining. We will focus on the design of cities—their buildings, streets, public spaces, communities—as well as on the confluences of nature, culture, technology, and economics in those spaces.

Forgeries have an incredible allure.  As with a conjuring trick, we are bemused when we are fooled, especially when our own finances and reputations are not involved.  However, on a societal level, rarely do we investigate this phenomenon in more than a superficial manner resulting in little understanding of the depth of a fake’s impact.  This class will delve more fully into the world of art forgeries to provide a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of their history, production, identification, and reception.  In order to encapsulate the nuances of this phenomenon, this class will take an interdisciplinary approach, including guest lectures, to foster discussion about the impact of art forgeries on a wide range of disciplines including art history, finance, law, museology, and conservation.  Through interdisciplinary dialogue, students will attempt to form their own philosophical approach to forgeries based on their fields of study in combination with art history.

This course aims to discuss and bring light to some issues related to the presence of Non-Western art in Western collections. By focusing on traditional African art, it intends to problematize the implications of collecting and exhibiting objects that were not necessarily made to be seen by everyone in their original contexts. How do museums deal with issues like these? Is it possible to decolonize African art collections? What strategies could be created to approach African art works in a more meaningful way? The students will address these and other questions through theoretical discussions and the development of an individual project involving a museum database.

What do we mean when we speak of Italian Renaissance Art?  Most people think of a few famous “geniuses” who worked in Florence, Rome, and Venice. The rich and varied artistic and cultural traditions of southern and northern Italy remain much less studied. This course will take on the canon, exploring ideas of centre and periphery, and investigating the complex networks of exchange that tied artists and their patrons in these less studied regions with other cultural and religious traditions from around the Mediterranean, north of the Alps, and other parts of the globe. We will examine how art was both cosmopolitan and intensely rooted in the local, taking as our case studies the often startlingly naturalistic polychrome sculptures that played such vital roles in people’s lives.

As a central part of the course, students will individually and collectively research, write, and curate a digital exhibition, which will be published at the end of the course.

*Please note that while this course will require intensive engagement, no prior knowledge of the art of this period is required.

This research-led course will examine the legacies of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement around the world. We will look at a variety of craft revival movements and a range of media and crafts, but we will focus on figures who most directly responded to Morris himself. 

What is an "art world"? Is there just one, or are there many?  How might you engage with "art worlds" as an audience member, artist, historian, curator, administrator, educator, fundraiser, dealer, board member, or collector? This course prepares you for a career as an arts professional, providing you with tools to understand and demystify  “art worlds,” introducing you to key challenges and problems facing art institutions today to help you become a more empowered, engaged, and critical thinker. 

[Note: Effective 2024-2025, both ARTH121 and ARTH122 replace ARTH120 as required courses for all ARTH plans. Students must take EITHER ARTH121 or ARTH122 to declare an ARTH plan, and BOTH must be completed in order to graduate with an ARTH plan. Students are advised to take both in their first year.]

Looking into a painting’s genesis: Technical Art History looks closely at the materials and techniques used to create art -- from Early Italian panel paintings to Piet Mondrian's abstract canvases -- and better understand when, how, why and by whom these works were created.

This course explores innovations in art and architecture during the first 200 years of the Renaissance, primarily in Italy but also in Northern Europe. The intellectual and cultural movement of the Renaissance provides the setting, and many examples of painting, sculpture and architecture take centre stage. We will investigate how artists revived ancient ideals and turned to nature for inspiration. We will also consider the impact of international  travel and trade on artistic representations. The journey begins in about 1300, when Dante’s poetic visions of heaven and hell found responses in wall paintings and sculptures, and ends in about 1500 with the extraordinary achievements in art, science and medicine of Leonardo da Vinci. 

An examination of architecture as it has developed in relation to the economies, technologies, and social practices of the modern world. Our focus will include architectural aesthetics, materials, structures, technologies, and spaces.

Instructor: J. Bevilacqua.

The period we now call "Gothic" was one of the most vibrant in the entire history of art. Covering all of Europe and the Mediterranean, parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia (via the Silk Roads), the Gothic might have been the first "international style" in art history. This course looks at the period anew through its art but also its literature.

Students will learn about the competing claims for realist, impressionist, neo-impressionist, post-impressionist, symbolist, and modernist art, and will work to place this art in its institutional, social, economic, and art historical contexts, while foregrounding critical gender and critical race studies approaches.

Utopian, dystopian, prefabricated, hand crafted, pop culture, counterculture...all these qualities describe a period of heightened architectural experimentation that occurred from the 1950s to the 1970s around the globe. We will be looking at the architecture and design of this period as well as the cultures and politics that informed them.

The Baroque era (c.1580–c.1800)–a time of social and religious crisis–is characterized by some the most gargantuan, lavishly-decorated buildings in the Western canon. This course will look at how Baroque architects attempted to create a sense of sublimity and authority or a sense of escape by combining painting, sculpture and architecture.

Instructor: A. Behan.

Most paintings are complex layered structures that were produced with a broad range of materials in distinct stages. This seminar will teach you how to use X-rays, UV, and infrared to study the genesis of these works. It will focus on the materials and techniques of Early Netherlandish painters such as Jheronimus Bosch (d. 1516), but these techniques can also be applied to examine paintings from other regions and time periods. 

An investigation of how cultural heritage has been preserved in different parts of the world in the past and the present, focusing on methods used to ameliorate or prevent damage and destruction caused by the environment, war, looting and restoration. Case studies will be drawn from the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610) and Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654) are
two of the best-known and most controversial artists of all time. This course explores how their
art viscerally reflects the violence, passion, and religious struggles of their day and may even be
autobiographical. Their questioning of sexual and gender norms predates more contemporary
artists such as Andy Warhol and Tracey Emin.

This course aims to present and discuss key themes and topics related to Curatorship and African arts, such as authenticity, authorship and repatriation. Through theoretical and practical analysis, students will be encouraged to reflect on how African arts have been displayed over time and the urgency of rethinking the role of curator. The students will write an exhibition project taking into account the new political, social and artistic demands related to African arts.

How do art historians put method and theory into practice? In this exploratory class, we read widely in iconography, formalism, biography, semiotics, post-structuralism, Marxism, social history of art, psychoanalysis, theories of gender and race, postcolonial and decolonial theory, seeking to experiment with the methods and theories most suited to the research questions that fuel our academic and creative interests.