Florentine Topographies: Art, Architecture, and Urban Life in the Italian Renaissance City

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course is a socio-spatial analysis of Florence and its most important urban complexes, which incorporated the interactive experience of images, objects, buildings, and urban communities. As a result, it draws on, both implicitly and explicitly, on the material, methods, and approaches of other disciplinary territories such geography, anthropology, social and cultural history, art and architectural history, as well as urban studies and it encourages you to think broadly about what it means to analyze history through an analysis of site specific practices both in terms of their design and production but also their historical reception, use, and experience. The motivation for this course comes from the way in which both Florence and the Renaissance have largely been explored from the perspective of design and production, artists, planners and patrons. Therefore, this course attempts to look at the way the city's inhabitants actually responded to some of the most important developments in early modern cultural production, and how actively they contributed to some of the most familiar environments of western Europe and continues to be the site of some of the most intense cultural tourism.