Painters, Builders, and Bankers in Early Modern Italy

How close can we get to understanding, or even to seeing, the art and architecture of 15th-century Italy? Michael Baxandall proposed studying it with a ‘period eye’ to understand the styles and functions of art and architecture in the domestic, civic, and religious lives of early modern people. We will learn to activate a period eye in the contexts of modern conservation, notions of cultural property, wars, the market and museums to understand both the original circumstances of the production of art, and to ask how these works are seen and the functions they serve today. A