Global Early Modern

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course considers the circulation of visual culture, material goods, artistic practices, and ideas across national borders during the early modern period (circa 1400 CE – 1700 CE). It takes as its point of departure the hypothesis that the period traditionally known as Renaissance/Baroque was marked by the mobility of artists, objects, philosophies, and a rich intellectual, material, and social culture across major international city centers. Within a framework that highlights the process of exchange, collaboration, and competition between cultures, the course examines how networks existed throughout the European courts of Italy, Spain, and France, and extended across the Levant, Latin America, Goa, Japan, and the Philippines. Students will challenge conventional ideas about center/periphery by evaluating case studies that highlight the role of humanism in patronage, diplomacy and gift exchange, missionary enterprises of the Counter Reformation, and the manufacturing of a Catholic imagination as part of the Age of Exploration and the rise of global empires. For more information about this and other courses in the Department of Art and Art History, please visit https://art.georgetown.edu