Constellations: HAA 2300 Special Topics Renaissance - Painting in Venice 1500-1530 and the Invention of Art

This class is a graduate seminar held to coincide with a major international exhibition of Venetian Renaissance painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Students would visit the exhibition during its last weekend (September 16-17), attend a scholar's symposium, and accompany the curator on a private viewing of the exhibition. A grant proposal to fund this trip for students is now pending. Instead of focusing solely on questions of attribution that have dominated past scholarly discussion, the seminar will focus on the issue of invention. It will examine how major artists (especially Bellini, Titian, and Giorgione) struggled for dominance within a cultural climate that had recently begun to prize invention and its visibility in works of art. The result was the utter transformation of traditional genres of painting and the creation of new ones, with profound implications for Italian painting and Western art in general. We will investigate changes within existing varieties of painting (altarpieces, portraits, and devotional works) and map the creation of new varieties (mythological painted poetries and dramatic portraits).