Lecture (LEC)

• Above class meets second eight weeks only
• Topic: The Playful Object in Early Modern Europe
• Above class participates in the Advance College Project

Our topic will be "The Playful Object in Early Modern Europe," and we will address objects that toy with us. The strategies at issue include, among other things, visual jokes, interpretive traps, representational ambiguities, and artisanal boasts in media including but not limited to painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Our primary goal will be to understand the relationship between these strategies and the larger aims most such artworks were expected to achieve. For instance, how should we respond to the self-portrait of Jan van Eyck embedded in a memorial image meant to honor a Canon in perpetuity before the congregation of his local church? Similarly, what are we to make of Paolo Veronese's defense, when hauled before the Council of Trent for making a supposedly indecorous Last Supper, that pictorial invention entitles one to use "the same license as poets and madmen." Do such instances constitute the "birth of art," as one strand of scholarship holds? Might there also be other functions at stake? And what sort of relationships might we map between those functions and the broader purposes visual and material expression served at the time? To begin answering such questions, we will discuss things that circulated throughout Europe and European colonial regions from roughly 1400-1650.