Paper Icons

Undergraduate

Print profoundly transformed how people thought about images and the nature of depicted subject matter. This seminar examines the impact of print through the prism of the early modern Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Our focus is on the trajectory of looseleaf prints, though we attend to the relation of standalone compositions and book printing. We begin in the fifteenth century, with the earliest Greek and Cyrillic prints, and end in the late nineteenth century, exploring, along the way, the techniques of woodcut, engraving, monotype icon tracings, and lithography. Key themes are the epistemic challenges posed by an ephemeral medium, the archaeology of medieval iconography, economies of loss, pilgrimage cartography, Slavic poetics and the emblem, and the monastic pastoral. Primary sources in translation complement secondary readings, shedding light on key artistic actors. Extensive use is made of the Greek and Slavic collections at the Beinecke and Yale University Art Gallery. No previous coursework in art history is required. Th 1:30pm-3:25pm