Politics, Religion, and Art in Antiquity: Representations in Paris

3 units

This course gives students an opportunity to really know encyclopedic museums, to know what motivated patrons commissioning art and artists creating it, the relationship of art to religion, cosmology, and craftwork, and why governments sponsor such public symbols of the state. The Louvre and the other major encyclopedic museums of Paris are themselves works of art, and they reflect the ways that states use architecture to express their ideals of legitimate power through the command of knowledge and aesthetics. The course further introduces students to the ethical issues surrounding the display of objects as aesthetic commodities, with only brief reference to their history, provenience and provenance in small print labels and notes.