Art History 280 - COLQ: REDEEMING MATTER

Topics course. This course explores matter as the spiritual economy of art in Italy from ca. 1550 to ca. 1750 and thereby challenges prevailing conventional historical and art-historical assumptions that the period is best understood as an articulation of liturgy, the Council of Trent, or the ?Counter Reformation.? How were associations between matter and the holy understood, contested and redefined? How were relationships between materiality and spirituality explored? We shall investigate issues turning on the significance of place, on metamorphosis and transformation of matter as metaphors for redemption and salvation, and on the spiritual work that art and architecture participated in and produced. Group II (E)