This course has been approved as a means of fulfilling the Curriculum I General Education requirements in the areas of Arts and of Meaning and Value, the U se of Language, and the Historical Process. The course is intended to increase your appreciation for the visual arts and to enable you to compare the visual arts to other contemporary modes of artistic expression such as sacred and secular literature and music. The course will present you with a wide range of examples of art drawn from the fields of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It will ask you to become familiar with the basic elements of artistic expression, such as line, shape and color, and to be able to analyze style. Moreover, the course will pose fundamental questions about the nature of art in the Middle Ages.
This course is also intended to expose you to the historical process. The course will do so by tracing the history of medieval arts in terms of the development of styles, subjects and themes in relation to the growth of the Christian church and its institutions. It will examine the context in which medieval art flourished by studying the lives and motives of patrons, audiences and artists. It will present art works both in terms of the historical situation for which they were created and the needs which they fulfilled and in terms of the evolution of understanding that succeeded their creation and that shapes their appreciation today.
This course integrates readings from primary and secondary sources. Two texts, one in intellectual and the other in art history, have been chosen to provide a synthesis of the period. These will be combined with research of primary texts including classical, early Christian and medieval authors. These authors include Prudentius, Eusebius, Jerome, Augustine, Bede, Anselm, Abelard and Thomas Aquinas. Art works will be presented both in terms of the historical situations for which they were created and the need which they fulfilled and in terms of the evolution of understanding that succeeded their creation and that shapes their appreciation today.