TOPICS: EROTIC BODIES IN ITALIAN RENNAISANCE PAINTING in Fall 2019 (AH3091A)

This course will have you think critically about the concept of the body as an object of desire in art. The concept is as old as human history and as current as the Internet. Images put bodies on display in private and public contexts, involving the viewer in various ways; yet how we interpret and relate to such images varies widely depending on our cultural understandings. Taking the Renaissance as the ground of our inquiry, we will ask: how is eroticism in art a response to its intellectual and cultural environment? And how do we begin to interpret the body in art with critical distance rather than with modern presumptions? To address these questions, this course will explore the forms and contexts in which Eros (love) and desire manifested themselves in representations of the human figure in 16th-century Italy.

We will discuss and evaluate current scholarship’s tendency to contextualize eroticism within the bounds of marriage, the male gaze, and hetero-normative relationships or to empty the erotic of meaning altogether by labeling such images “pin-ups.” The aims of this course will be to examine the broader intellectual discourses on eroticism and beauty that existed in the Renaissance and to explore the ways in which painting responded to these on its own terms. Specifically, we will look at painting’s relationship to poetry, philosophical queries on the nature of love, the senses and the act of creation, and the role of beauty in inciting religious devotion. Issues of consideration will be gender, sexuality, beauty, spectatorship, tactility and vision, pleasure, and materiality, as they pertain to the works.