Courses
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Singing and dancing to an Italian song during Italian language class
Video courtesy of Clarissa Thiessen
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Italian language
Instructors: Linguaviva staff
Required course, 4 semester credits
Classes are taught in Italian at Linguaviva, an Italian language institute in Florence. Instruction emphasizes spoken colloquial Italian and is most intensive during the first four weeks so that students may quickly acquire conversational ability. Classes are taught completely in Italian. Students who have previosuly studied Italian will be placed in language classes appropriate to their levels of proficiency. The Linguaviva instructors are not just language teachers but also rich sources of information about Italian culture, and they help students solve the daily problems which Italians and foreigners share.
Art and Culture in Florence: From the age of Lorenzo il Magnifico to Cosimo I
Instructor: Josephine Rogers Mariotti, Program Director
Elective course, 4 semester credits
Click here to see a course syllabus
The course proposes to survey the development of the arts in Florence from the time of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici (the Magnificent) to the early reign of Cosimo I de’ Medici, the second Duke of Tuscany. Using the figure of Leon Battista Alberti and his treatise on painting as a bridge between the early and later renaissance, the course will begin with a brief survey of the artistic culture and major workshops of late 15th century Florence (Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio), the training ground of the masters of the High Renaissance whose lives and works will be our next focus. These include, among others, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, Filippino Lippi, Fra Bartolomeo and Andrea del Sarto. More than a monographic study of each, we will attempt to reconstruct their stylistic and cultural interactions and environment. Our trip to Rome will allow us to witness the decorative cycles of Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican - paragons of a "golden age" dramatically interrupted by the "Sack of Rome" of 1527. With the spread of influence of their “grand manners”, our focus will shift to the next phase of development termed as ‘Mannerism’ or "Maniera", a phase of Renaissance art that we will endeavor to define and explore. Our investigation of this “post-classical” or “post-peak” era begins with the early experimental and expressively charged art of Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino and other Tuscan masters who coincide chronologically and for only certain stylistic tendencies with the followers of Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome and beyond. The challenge here is to detect and analyze the transformations in style and content that lead to the early stages of the artistic activity in Florence at the time of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. The courtly production of one of the epoch’s greatest protagonists, Agnolo Bronzino and that of other personalities will conclude our studies. In-class sessions will alternate with visits to monuments and museums in and around Florence allowing students to integrate their academic studies with direct experience of the works and artists under study.
The Medici as Patrons of the Arts
Instructor: Josephine Rogers Mariotti, Program Director
Elective course, 4 semester credits
Click here to see a course syllabus
The Medici family is arguably the single most important family in Florentine history, generation after generation, all active patrons of the arts during centuries in which the city experienced its greatest cultural and artistic flourishing. This course will trace the family’s history as art patrons during the course of the 15th and early 16th century, examining the relations between specific members of the dynasty and the art produced under their auspices. Beginning with the late 14th century, at the debut of the rise in wealth and power of the Medici, we will explore the history and profiles of various members of the family from Giovanni di Bicci, Cosimo the Elder, Piero the Gouty, Lorenzo il Magnifico, to the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, as well as other related personages known to the history of the arts. On site experience of the art they promoted will allow us to explore: how each patron relates to the artists employed; how the art sponsored reflects personal philosophy and persona; how patronage relates, contributes to, and reflects contemporary culture and philosophy; how the art produced under their auspices fits within the cultural, political and social make-up of the city. We will also see the significant role the Medici played in the complex game of art and politics with regard to other centers in Italy, some of which we will have the opportunity of visiting during the course of the term. Thus, this course will focus on the major personalities of the early branch of the Medici, concluding with a rapid glance at the initial stages of the age to follow – the Duchy of Tuscany under Medici rule. All sessions will be held on-site according to the schedule that follows with the exception of one in-class session every other week intended to help consolidate knowledge acquired on the field.
The Sight-Size Tradition: Drawing and Portraiture
Instructor: Staff of the Charles H. Cecil Studios
Elective course, 4 semester credits
Click here to see a course syllabus
This Studio Art course will teach a historic technique for drawing from a live model, from casts of famous statues, and from the city itself. Live models will be used for full figure drawing and casts for portraiture. Classroom instruction will take place in the Charles H. Cecil Studios, the most historic Florentine atelier still in active use. At the end of the semester, there will be an exhibit of the student work and a final critique.
Art in Context: Florentine Decorative Complexes 1300-1450
Instructor: Gail Solberg
Elective course, 4 semester credits
Click here to see a course syllabus
This course examines multi-part artistic environments and is based on the premise that they can be fully understood only when approached as integrated wholes. On-site study ideally equips us to investigate how various components interact as parts of an ensemble. We ask how function governed what the artist(s) produced in a variety of decorative complexes, and then how the contemporary audience decoded the visual result. Ensembles for scrutiny include works in sculpture, painting, and architecture within family chapels, convents and monasteries, miraculous sites, the town hall, the civic piazza, and the cathedral complex.
The premier decorative ensemble in Florence is the cathedral square with its church, baptistery, campanile, and surrounding piazza. A number of sessions dedicated to the cathedral complex open the course. In the Palazzo dei Signori or town hall (the Palazzo Vecchio) campaigns of decoration from our period were lost in the sixteenth century refashioning of the interior, but the historical record serves to reconstruct what once was presented. We will study the evolution of the piazza surrounding the town hall--a remarkable construction that reflects the planners’ ingenuity and their vision of an urban ideal that they understood Florence to reflect. The Ponte Vecchio is considered as a manifestation of the same enlightened urban planning. Comparatively contained ensembles are family chapels in the great churches of Sta Croce, Sta Maria Novella, San Lorenzo and Sta Maria del Carmine. Students will take charge of a chapel during the term, presenting it to the class in an on-site session. Other ensembles of décor for our scrutiny served the religious life, such as those in the nuns’ realms at Sta Felicita, Sant’Ambrogio, and Sant’ Apollonia, and those for Franciscan and Dominican friars in the conventual houses, but also at San Marco. Presentation of miraculous objects produced some spectacular ensembles, prime among them the tabernacle at Orsanmichele.
The purview of the course may include Siena, where parallels for the Florentine experience are abundant. Among many artists treated, the major figures are the painters Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna, Andrea Bonaiuti, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Castagno, and the sculptors Andrea Pisano, Orcagna (again), Ghiberti, Nanni di Banco, and Donatello. Some background in art history, ideally of Italy, is highly desirable.
Weaving the Tale: Literary and Visual Art Narratives of Renaissance Florence
Elective course (Fall 2011), 4 semester credits
Click here to see a course syllabus
Studying the cupola mosaics of the Florence Baptistery, one notes four biblical narratives: the history of the world from the Creation to the Flood and the lives of Joseph, Jesus, and John the Baptist. Arranged in four separate bands, the stories can be read horizontally and thus chronologically, and vertically, i.e. typologically and allegorically. Italo Calvino, the most widely translated contemporary Italian master of storytelling, employs a similar strategy in his short story cycles The Castle of Crossed Destinies and The Tavern of Crossed Destinies. The stories in these cycles, told through a sequence of fifteenth-century French and Italian tarot cards, and illustrated with reproductions of the cards, can be read chronologically, as arranged in the printed book, or else the reading can follow the arrangement of the cards (for instance, cross-wise or from back to front). There is yet another dimension to Calvino’s narrative strategy and to the narrative of the Baptistery mosaic artist, Gaddo Gaddi. Just as the Baptistery visual narratives are inspired by Biblical stories, Calvino’s stories reprise episodes from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, inviting multiple, layered narrative arrangements.
Italian visual and language artists are especially fond of such narrative inter-weaving. Taking advantage of on-site explorations of room and furniture art in Florentine palazzos and of church art in Florence and Siena, we will analyze the narrative structures of art objects designed for daily consumption and reflection. We will study the interfaces of these narrative structures with tales and tale cycles by authors from the Italian Renaissance or authors writing about the Italian Renaissance. The goal is to develop an understanding of the close, lived relationship between the world of Renaissance Florentines and ancient or Christian history, of the porous boundaries between modernity and history, the secular and the sacred in the Renaissance. We will also pose the question about the state of these boundaries today, based on the modern readings and your lived experience of present-day Italian culture.
Dante’s Divine Comedy and the City of Florence
Elective course (Fall 2011), 4 semester credits
Click here to see a course syllabus
In this course we will study Dante’s Divine Comedy in the poet’s cultural milieu, in sites that nourished his creative imagination. We will approach the intricately woven poem the way we map a city: starting with its overall shape, the principles of its organization, the range of its characters, then exploring in analytical detail the barren expanses and dark alleys of Inferno, the artists’ workshops of Purgatorio, and the orderly, yet magical civic landscape of Paradiso. As Catherine Keen argues, “political ideas about the organization of human life into cities, kingdoms, that form so clear a strand in the Commedia, are communicated in a language, form and style that their author made immediately accessible and relevant to an Italian, urban audience.” We will study this language and the poetic traditions it evokes and revises (Biblical and classical literature, medieval lyric, courtly romance, the allegorical tradition). We will also study the poem’s interfaces with the visual and literary art that its original “readers,” including those who heard it read aloud in the piazzas of Florence, would have been so familiar with (church art representations of religious themes such as the Last Judgment, saints’ lives, biblical narratives; panel paintings, etc.). Finally, we will discuss the Commedia’s commentary on the political divisiveness and turmoil of Dante’s era and its envisioning of imperial utopia.
The course will be taught in English, but we will use a bilingual edition of the Commedia and on occasion, will sound out Dante’s cadences. Every week, we will take our books to relevant sites in Florence and nearby Tuscan cities to unravel significances generated at the intersection of locale and literary and artistic texts.
Narration and Meaning in the Music and Visual Arts of Florence 1300-1700
Elective course (Fall 2012), 4 semester credits
Click here to see a course syllabus
What does a work of art – painting, sculpture, fresco – tell the viewer? Overt messages, allegorical representations, thinly veiled political and social commentary, and sensuous enjoyment abound in art and have their aural counterpart in music – songs, motets, Masses, music for the stage and ballets. The Baptistry doors and Giotto’s frescoes in Santa Croce tell a story; so does a motet by Francesco Landini and an opera by Jacopo Peri. The goal of this course is to hear and learn about music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and early Baroque that complements art of the same periods. Students will come away from the course with an appreciation of the multi-dimensionality of the arts, artists, and culture of Florence from 1300 to 1650.
In-class lectures on musical styles and listening examples will alternate with on-site explorations of art and architecture in Florence. Beyond comparing stylistic commonalities in music and art of the same periods, the course will examine how musicians are depicted in paintings and drawings in Florentine churches and museums. Paintings of the Nativity, in particular, commonly feature angels playing musical instruments. We will learn about the instruments and their associations (e.g., with chamber music, secular singing and dancing, and sacred music) and listen to examples of period music itself. As part of our study of instrumental music, the class will visit churches to see and hear historic organs and learn about their role in the music of the Church throughout the centuries. Assigned readings will supplement lectures. Written work will consist of several listening exams to identify musical works studied in class and weekly essays comparing visual art and musical works that they discover on their own. A reflection paper on selected expeditions will round out the coursework.
Patronage, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Florence
Elective course (Fall 2012), 4 semester credits
Click here to see a course syllabus
Art and music have always been used in the service of religion and politics. The patronage system served musicians, artists, dancers, and poets alike in Florence: the resulting works were created to glorify the city, mythologize its past, and further the political and social goals of powerful families and institutions. Who were the patrons and the audiences for music created in early modern Florence? What role did gender play in the commissioning of art and music, in the subject matter, in the portrayal of women? The ways in which both men and women used the arts in the process of self-fashioning – to create symbolic responses to historical events and assert the legitimacy of an individual ruler – will be a subject of inquiry in the course.
A prime focus of the course will be discussions of life under the Medicis. Examples of self-fashioning began with Cosimo I, the first Medici duke, who appropriated the Sala Grande in the Palazzo della Signoria, filling the rooms with allegorical paintings of himself. A particularly fascinating period in Florence was the regency of Christine of Lorraine and her daughter-in-law, Maria Magdalena of the Hapsburg line, both of whom commissioned works of art and music in which women feature prominently.
Students in this course will develop their analytical skills in order to uncover deeper meaning/s in the art and music being studied. By seeing these works and others in situ, reading libretti, and listening to music either in concert or on recordings, students will explore the methods and mediums by which meaning is conveyed, namely, myth, allegory, technical control (brushwork, color, chiaroscuro, symbolism, and in the case of art; text, structure, line, harmony, and rhythm in music), and function. How do art and music reflect the concerns and the qualities valued by the people who commission it, and by the people who receive it? These are timeless issues that students will continue to wrestle with for the rest of their lives.