Colloquium in Art History: Art and Texts

From antiquity through the 19th-century, most art in the Western tradition was derived from identifiable literary sources. Invention was calibrated by how well and with how much originality a visual artist depicted a scene from a textual source. In this course we will closely examine artistic interpretations of passages from the Old and New Testaments, The Apocrypha, the devotional literature of the 13th and 14th-centuries, The Iliad of Homer, and the Metamorphoses of Ovid. We will conclude with a case of parallelism, rather than direct influence: Zola's novel Nana and representations of prostitution in 19th-century Paris. 3 hr. lect.