Art, Identity, and the Human Body in Early Modern Europe

3.0 credits · Undergraduate

This lecture introduces students to the multivalent attitudes towards and understandings of the body in early modern Europe, and how artmakers contributed and responded to these forces between 1400 and 1650. Bringing together the histories of art, science, and philosophy, as well as social, cultural, medical, and global history methodologies, this course explores how artworks and objects reveal the fluid cultural practices and societal norms of early modern Europe. Lecture topics will include the rediscovery of the classical bodily ideal; the influence of humoral theory and anatomical studies on artmaking; the interactions of art and the bodily senses; global encounters with non-European monstrous bodies, and the gendered, racialized, eroticized, divine, aging, and/or disabled body. Students will gain a nuanced comprehension of how early modern people saw and understood themselves and their bodies, in life, and in art.