ART 295-02 - Special Topic: Subverting the Renaissance: Queerness and Visual Culture, 1500-1600

4 credits (Spring)

A methodologically traditional, heteronormative approach to idiosyncratic male artist-geniuses such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli has dominated Renaissance art history. Yet given its cross-cultural origins and paradoxical investment in both ‘pagan’ antiquity and Christian humanism, Renaissance visuality is anything but straightforward. In this survey of sixteenth-century art, we will read scholarship invigorated by queer theory and gender studies as well as primary sources by queer art writers, e.g. Vernon Lee, Walter Pater, and Henry James.

Prerequisite: ART 103.
Instructor: Lyon