UWA Handbook 2024

Unit Overview

Description

This unit provides an understanding of the art produced by the new bourgeois societies in northern Europe in terms of the contrasting aristocratic court cultures of France and Britain and the Protestant Republics of Holland and Germany. It entails in-depth exploration of world calibre artists such as Van Dyke, Frans Hals, Vermeer and Rembrandt as well as lesser known artists; architects such as Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor; and anonymous popular artists. While religious conflict provides a major theme, the big difference from the art of the Counter-Reformation in Southern Europe at Level 2 of the History of Art major is that resistance to idolatry provided the impetus for secular art in Northern Europe. This drew its exciting new themes from a range of areas including science, exploration trade, domestic settings, Northern versions of Italian academic art, the nude, still life and the exotic entertainments accruing from new wealth. At the same time, aesthetic curiosity about these secular themes was qualified by religious presentiments of death and the certainty of divine judgement of worldly pleasures. A major focus of the unit is on analogies between seventeenth-century conflicts concerning idolatry and iconoclasm and their contemporary heritage in the visual formation of religious subjectivities in the globalised and culturally diverse environments in which graduates of the unit will be living and working.

Credit

6 points

Details for undergraduate courses

• Level 3 elective

Outcomes

Students are able to (1) identify the historical and cultural contexts of Reformation art and architecture in several Northern European countries—Holland, Germany, France and Britain (e.g. how art reflected contrasts between 'vertically' organised aristocratic and 'horizontally' organised republican societies in Northern Europe); (2) apply key theoretical approaches in the social history of art to the complex reflexive qualities of images created to embody awareness of the religious dangers of idolatry and to distinguish between the various genres and conventions of the period such as the nude, landscape painting, still life, genre and Vanitas painting; (3) discuss changes in the scholarship on seventeenth-century art and architecture (e.g. where the competing claims of realistic and emblematic readings of works of art and architecture are concerned); (4) integrate visual and aesthetic analyses into broader discourses on such themes as the migration of Italian taste to Britain, the distinctive forms of Dutch urban development, the commercial aspects of Dutch art, and the impact of science and exploration on the arts; and (5) apply the methods of the latest scholarship on Reformation art and architecture in arguments whose clarity, logic and theoretical rigour do justice to the distinctive qualities of Reformation art in relation to the major themes of the unit. This includes an understanding of how seventeenth-century conflicts regarding idolatry and iconoclasm are registered in the visual formation of religious subjectivities of the globalised and culturally diverse world in which graduates will live and work.

Assessment

Indicative assessments in this unit are as follows: (1) two written assignments; (2) two oral assignments; and (3) a tutorial presentation and participation. Further information is available in the unit outline.

Student may be offered supplementary assessment in this unit if they meet the eligibility criteria.

Unit Coordinator(s)

Associate Professor Darren Jorgensen

Unit rules

Prerequisites

MEMS2001 Classical Traditions and Transformations in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
or any Level 2 History of Art unit

Incompatibility

VISA2208 Art of the Reformation

Contact hours

lectures: 2 hrs per week
tutorials: 1 hr per week

Note

Enrolled students can access unit material via the LMS (Learning Management System).