Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This is a three-credit foundational course designed for students studying in Italy. This course is taught in English and on-site over the course of three weeks in an immersive format that includes field trips each week to different cities. The course satisfies the University of Notre Dame's history, literature and fine arts ways of knowing and can be counted toward the minor and major in Italian and the minor in European Studies. Papal Rome between Martin V (1417-1431) and Sixtus V (1585-1590), Florence between Cosimo il Vecchio (1389-1464) and Cosimo I (11519-1574), Este Ferrara, the Mantova of the Gonzagas, Montefeltro Urbino, and the Naples of the Aragonese kings are six vantage points from which to explore the Italian Renaissance as the result of the complex interactions between political power, patronage and the flourishing of a culture, ranging from architecture, the visual arts, literature, philosophy and music that constitutes one of the foundations of modern Europe. When Renaissance Italy was a mosaic of states in competition with each other, based on warfare, easy prey of foreign powers, Italian courts also provided the nourishing humus for humanism to develop, and the intellectual, social and financial infrastructure for an intense networking of ideas and relationships among intellectuals and artists. It was in this environment that a renovated interest for antiquity thrived and the new languages of the arts were codified, tested and established, including a literary language that aspired at giving voice to the common traits and incarnating the unified spirit of a fragmented nation.