ART 382 - Belle Ribicoff Seminar

Semester Offered: Fall
1/2 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15a: Patronage as Power: The Medici and their Artists in Florence and Rome. Over the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Medici family in Florence and later in Rome devised a series of strategies to assert and then maintain their control over both city and Church. Given the size and extent of their artistic commissions, their locations in areas where political enemies held sway, the erasure of works by earlier patrons, and the novel style that artists like Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and, later, Raphael and Michelangelo brought to the work, it is not surprising that their carefully designed visual propaganda was an important tool in their rise to power. Yet ambiguities of meaning also served the Medici in deflecting the meanings of some of their commissions so that more conventional purposes such as religious piety could assume a dominating role, freeing them of charges of willful assumption of political power in the republican state of Florence. Once family members assumed the papal office, however, such pretense was no longer necessary, providing a driving force to a new international style. Mr. Paoletti.

Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

Four meetings will be held on Friday afternoons October 10, 17, 31 and November 7 from 1:00-3:00 pm. Two of them, October 30 and November 6, will be held Thursday night at 6:30-8:30 pm. Some classes will meet at Vassar; others will take place in New York City. Transportation will be provided.

Enrollment limited to 12 students.

One 2-hour period.