Picturing Death

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course explores many of the ways in which death has been represented, pondered, used, resisted, and embraced in the visual arts. Our main focus will not be on images of the dead and dying, but rather on Death itself—which cannot be fully captured by such terms as event, process, condition, or idea. Each week we will address an array of disparate artworks and readings brought together around one idea, such as time, memory, illness, disaster, and consequences. Most of our examples will be European and American art from the late middle ages to the present. This wide-ranging approach allows us to compare perceptions and uses of both art and death—which shape each other in countless ways. What do changing formulations of death, which is both universal and unknowable, tell us about the societies in which they appear? Why, for example, does death dance with the living in many late medieval images, loom silently from still life paintings in the 17th century, or explode into zombie hordes in the 21st? Class meetings are primarily discussion, with some lecture. Students’ main contributions include brief class presentations, short writing assignments, and a longer paper on a topic developed in collaboration with the professor. We will also make one or two class visits to area museums.