This course examines medieval church treasuries, their contents and architectural settings, and the ways they have been conceptualized from the Middle Ages to the present. It highlights the diversity of treasury contents, from liturgical chalices to legal documents, who contributed to the shape of such collections and why, and how the collections were documented. Major themes in present-day art history create the conceptual underpinnings of the course, including materiality, collecting and display, mobility, and patronage. The course will provide opportunities for students to work with objects in local museums and to develop research projects in the Digital Humanities. Reading knowledge of French, German, Italian, and Latin is helpful.

Part of the U of T Getty Connecting Art Histories project, this course examines the arts of medieval China — especially those of the port cities of Guangzhou and Quanzhou — from a multicultural perspective. This course considers how the idea of "medieval art" might be understood with respect to the production of art in China, how such art raises questions about the geography and periodization of native and non-native art forms in China, and how non-native art forms that flourished in China connect to their originating sites and move along the networks of their transmission. While in the past decade art history has embraced the idea of globalization, this seminar seeks to probe the making of medieval Chinese art in postglobal context by introducing the methodological tools of postglobal art history, a new approach to the discipline emerging from developing art histories (i.e., from non-Western nations in which art history has developed as a discipline only since the late 20th century).

This seminar investigates a wide range of questions related to the use and function of imagery in medieval books. What are the origins of medieval book illustration in the transition from roll to codex; what kinds of books were typically illustrated — and how; who conceived of the complex pictorial programs found in medieval manuscripts, and how did these programs function? Issues of patronage, audience and reception are central to this seminar, which focuses on specific case studies of manuscripts from throughout Europe dating from the late antique period until the advent of printing.

Early medieval art has long been viewed in the shadow of Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture, although the seven hundred years between c. 400 and 1100 produced a wealth of material culture that provides critical insights for understanding the formation of Europe. The seminar will focus in any given semester on one of the following four subdivisions with this period: Merovingian and Migratory, Carolingian, Ottonian, or Insular and Anglo-Saxon. The art and architecture in these periods can be understood in light of their relationship to the classical past, the development of political and ecclesiastical structures, the importance of the cult of saints, and the rise of monasticism.

This course re-examines how notions of the otherworldly shaped Islamic art and architecture, with a focus on its formative and medieval period. It explores the act of building and making as a form of being, considering the ways art architecture upheld human encounters with the divine, the celestial realm, as well as other otherworldly beings, benign and malevolent. The course considers the ways Muslims navigated notions of sacrality through a lifecycle, from daily to annual ritual practices and how architecture and material culture emerged dialogically within this context. Through an exploration of Islamic temporality, eschatology, the afterlife, early Islamic sacred geographies, sacred cities, ritual practice, pilgrimage, relics and funerary cultures of early Islam, the course challenges notions of sacred space as a typology to reveal Islam’s relation to the otherworldly as an embodied enactment of transcendence.

A critical examination of seminal early Islamic sites, including the Mosque of the Prophet in Madina, the Great Mosque of Damascus, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, select Umayyad desert palaces, Abbasid Baghdad and Samarra, and the palace of Madinat al-Zahra and Great Mosque in Cordoba. Themes discussed include cultural encounters with late antiquity, the ancient near east and Europe, the impact of nascent Islamic institutions, questions of patronage, and the role of ceremonial.

This seminar explores the architectural and urban development of Islamic Cairo (al-Qahira) between the 7th and 16th centuries. As a nexus of both the Islamic empire and the Mediterranean world, Cairo provides an opportunity to explore a major Islamic Medieval city. Modern day Cairo emerged first as a provincial capital (al-Fustat and later al-Qata'a) in the 7th and 8th century and later morphed into a capital under successive dynasties from the 9th to the 16th century. Exploring Cairo throughout this critical historical period, one of both relative stability and upheaval during the post-conquest period to the Crusades, allows for a better understanding of the reciprocity between architecture and urbanism on the one hand and broader political shifts on the other. A central organizing theme of this course is Cairo's position as a place of multiplicity and confessional diversity, embedded within networks of cultural and economic exchange. Other themes explored include the role played by ceremonies and processions on urban form and the development of public space as well as the development of various religious, charitable, military and educational institutions and their impact upon shaping the city.

The Umayyads present a unique opportunity for the study of Medieval Mediterranean architectural history. As religious and political leaders, Umayyad caliphs and their patronage manifest a rootedness in late antiquity that challenges notions of Islamic art as "other." By considering key Umayyad monuments, cities and material culture we will problematize binaries of east vs. west, sacred vs. secular and center vs. periphery to reveal what makes the Umayyads empire builders of the first order. Contextualized through ceremonial, pilgrimage, trade, praxis, and governance, the built environment operates as a vehicle to access deeper and more nuanced understandings of Islamic history.

Two major exhibitions, symposia, and several new publications have recently reconsidered the art of the Italian painter Correggio (1489–1534), but its understanding remains problematic within the current paradigms of Renaissance art. Correggio's art has generated oppositional responses in the scholarship, ranging from its being considered an embodiment of "Renaissance classicism," to its characterization as "proto-baroque," or to the artist's supposed exemplary status as a "post-classical" master. One of the central questions underlying the seminar is: where does Correggio's art fit in the current Renaissance art history? The work of Correggio and its reception will be examined not just in and of itself, but as paradigmatic of the interpretative impasse that characterizes Renaissance art history as it is currently practiced. The seminar will consider Correggio's most ambitious projects — his altarpieces, domes decorations, and erotic images — and reconstruct their referential structures and meanings. But the examination of this still undervalued protagonist of Renaissance art will serve as a springboard for reflecting upon larger problems in the field: the ontological status of Renaissance art history, its methods and approaches, and the present-day "crisis" of interpretation.

The course investigates the dense intersections of art and monasticism in early modern Italy. We will examine works in different media and sizes at key junctures of the history of art and religious reform in Renaissance Europe.

With the material turn, art historians have been engaged in imaginative explorations of the uses and meanings of materials in early modern art and visual culture. This course focuses on crossings from one medium to another (intermediality or intermateriality) whether through conscious imitation (material mimesis) or translation. We will look at explicit statements of medium-specificity in treatises; the situating of drawing as the unifying art; border crossings in the well-known art theoretical debate of the 16th century, the paragone; anxiety about deception (terracotta that feigns stone, stucco that imitates gold). A principal preoccupation will be with the intermedial effects of the introduction of printed images. For while intermediality is as old as art itself, there is an intensification with the introduction of print, when all media became graphic, only to be remedialized again. The chronological span is 15th–18th centuries and the geographic reach is global, with a particular focus on Europe and Latin America (where print was translated into painting and architecture often and in unexpected ways). We will spend time on signal works of intermediality (Roger van der Weyden, Rubens, Gianlorenzo Bernini) as well as many anonymous works, especially in the Americas (16th–18th centuries). This course is historiographically oriented, tracking the reception of these historical artefacts alongside the modern call for truth-to-materials and the post-war call for medium-specificity in abstract art. A goal of the course is to develop a lexicon of terms specific to intermediality (pictorialization, linearization, resurfacing, flattening, modelling, etc.).

The "global" turn in the discipline of art history too often eliminates the locality — the specific and sometimes not well-known places where art is made — from its purview in favour of geographically expansive narratives focused on circulation and reception of works made in localities. As a counterpoint to these narratives, this seminar explores ideas of artistic localities in Italy and China during the early modern period. Its principal focus is on questions of place and cultural geography, but it also necessarily examines the relationship of place to artistic exchange in networks of various sizes (those small walled cities, those of metropolitan centers, and those of "global" reach). To address methodological concerns, we will critically review existing literature on artistic geography, from period sources to contemporary works.

This seminar, to be co-taught by the Associate Curator of Modern Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) seeks to problematize the discourse and practice of formalism — i.e., critical approaches to the study of visible and material features of an art object — in the discipline of art history. Weekly seminars will alternate between the gallery spaces of the AGO, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), and other local collections, in order to facilitate the kind of first-hand looking at objects practiced by true formalists. First-hand engagement with objects will be combined with the reading of various methodological, historiographical, and theoretical texts, including those by the British art critic Roger Fry (1866–1934), who wrote extensively about both Chinese ceramics and modern art, and Henri Focillon (1881–1943), the French formalist who was also a Director of the Musée de Beaux Arts de Lyon. By developing critical, analytical, and object-focused skills, this seminar has three goals: to problematize the division between the fine and decorative arts; to consider the possibilities and limitations of established methods of formalism that have been resurgent with the rise of "Global Art History;" and, to suggest the importance of formalism in an era of methodological experimentation that at times eclipses the object. Ultimately, this seminar will equip students with tools for thinking through and making sustained art-historical arguments about diverse types of objects that are both methodologically rigorous and materially grounded.

This seminar seeks to recover pre-modern Chinese notions of what contemporary art history terms "the multiple" in order to understand the ways in which pre-modern Chinese objects were understood in their own cultural context in dialogue with terms and concepts established in the implicitly European discipline of art history. The course will introduce the theory, methods, and historiographic foundations of the idea of the multiple and probe the corresponding relationship of the idea of the multiple to concepts such as originality, uniqueness, and the masterpiece in pre-modern China and in the discipline of art history.

This course seeks to train students in the history of one the world's major traditions of painting, namely that of China, and in the methods for studying it — including in Sinological context and in dialogue with other traditions of painting. Weekly seminars will leverage Toronto collections, namely paintings in the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and painting facsimiles in the collection of the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library at U of T, so that students can acquire an object-based foundation for researching Chinese paintings using established and novel methods in the discipline of art history. Beyond gaining hands-on experience with objects of a medium that — while painting — differs significantly from dominant Euromerican expectations for "painting," this seminar will introduce students to theory, method, and historiography for studying Chinese painting, emic and etic, in dialogue with objects. This seminar will also position students to work meaningfully with a medium that, given its fragility and foreignness, many find difficult to handle and/or understand, teaching students, whether literate in Chinese or not, how to do research on these objects. The ultimate goal of this seminar is to enable students to mobilize knowledge of a distinctive premodern non-Western medium in the Eurocentric discourses of the discipline of art history. Knowledge of Chinese language not required; students who read Classical Chinese will have the option of reading primary source texts in the original.

What types of communication and value did each of the many media allow and express? Many of the same artists designed artifacts in multiple media. The role of drawing became essential to all arts, but drawing alone could not define the material and spatial properties of other media. Concepts of skeuomorphism, affordance, and intermediality have occupied scholars from James J. Gibson, Donald Norman, and W.J.T. Mitchell to our own Evonne Levy. We will examine theories that underlie these ideas along with principles of word-and-image relations, artistic mode, categories and functions of drawing, issues of color and polychromy, theatricality, and the role of family and professional networks. We will investigate the artistic culture of the Netherlands as a system, and we will concentrate on the sixteenth century, a period in which the region became truly Pan-European, with artistic and intellectual ties from Italy to Sweden, from England to Ukraine.

Painters at work in Italy, France and Germany, 1550-1700. The aim of this seminar is to understand studios as places for painting, teaching, selling and modelling, and hence painters as a craftsman, teacher and team boss, negotiator and salesroom manager. Research topics include: the physical location and environment of painters’ studios; painting as a corporeal act; painting as a performance for studio visitors; self-representation of painters at work; bodily traces in paintings (fingerprints and finger painting); visual and literary evidence of production. An eclectic array of approaches and sources will be used: material culture, anthropology, scientific conservation, social and economic history, and literary analysis. Source material will include biographies, letters, diaries, account books, inventories, testaments, lawsuits, technical manuals and (naturally) prints, drawings and paintings. Reading knowledge of Italian, German, or French is required.

The development of Renaissance art has often been traced on the basis of large-scale works, including grandiose palaces, monumental chapels, colossal sculptures, imposing frescoes and massive tapestries. Small-format works, however, constitute an area of artistic performance that deserves further scrutiny and critical attention. This seminar explores miniaturization in several media works produced ca.1400–1600. We will be looking at a corpus of small-size works that provide some of the most compelling responses to questions of scale, crafting, performativity, and portability. Readings include chapters by Mack, Payne, Lévi-Strauss, and Bredekamp, among others. There may be visits to local museums if the situation allows.

Renaissance architecture is no longer understood as simply an Italian or even a European phenomenon. This course looks at the architectural interactions between regions as the result of trade, war, pilgrimage and diplomacy. Students will study architectural exchange between Europe and South Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and Africa in order to understand how the conditions of a global economy shaped the development of architecture in the early modern era.

This course examines varieties of sculpture in Northern Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth century with particular emphasis on the Netherlands and Germany. The course questions the near-exclusive focus on painting as the quintessential artistic medium of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Sculpture was an essential medium for the expression of power relations. Tombs of the high nobility framed and controlled the communal space of churches and chapels. Towering sacrament houses offered magnificent stages for the Eucharist — the material focus of the central drama of the church. Mantelpieces in town halls asserted the complex relationship between competing groups within the city. Carved altarpieces found visual formulas for metaphysical notions of sacred space and time. And smaller works like bronze statuettes became treasured objects in Renaissance collections.

Water comprises the majority of the earth's surface, and has shaped the creation of art, architecture, and objects as the means of travel and transport as well as a powerful cultural metaphor. This course offers students the opportunity to study the environmental conditions, imagery, and mechanisms used by artists and craftsmen as well as the everyday experiences of water. Each week will offer a particular case study and point of view through which to study the connections between liquid contexts and art objects. Themes will include flows, surfaces and depths, water edges, and technologies. Students may work on projects in their choice of geographical and historical moments.

This course will explore a clearly defined topic and/or a problem related to Chinese painting history: either in local, China-wide, or global context; and, in a period from the medieval to the contemporary, but not necessarily including the entire breadth of these these temporal periods. By the design of the instructor, the course may address select developments in the history of Chinese painting. Some modules might involve the study of: specific painters, movements, or dynasties; painting theory; a text or texts of Chinese art writing in the original; or historiographic problems. All modules will emphasize: key primary sources (paintings and texts) in their original format; the development of the Sinological, philological, and bibliographical skills for working with these primary sources; and exploration of the secondary literature.

This course emphasizes the development of art-historical skills grounded in Sinological practice in order to prepare students for further research either in entry-level art world jobs or in graduate school (including MA or PhD theses in Chinese painting history).

Reading knowledge of Chinese or another East Asian language recommended.

Artwriting' can be thought of as writing 'about' art in the broadest senses, both thematic and spatial, including a website or monograph on an artist, an article or blog, a text in philosophical aesthetics, texts by artists, art that employs written or aural language, or a label in a museum. We will consider these practical and theoretical practices in European and North American contexts from c. 1750 to the present. We will discuss the relationships between and mutual definition of text and image, the institutional contexts of artwriting, and the import of geographical locale and cultural assumptions to the types of imagery and text produced. We will focus on published and unpublished travel narratives from the 18th and 19th centuries as artwriting, specifically as imagetexts (Mitchell) and iconotexts (Louvel). We will use Arctic voyages from the Anglosphere and Nordic countries as the anchor for comparative studies of illustrated travel literature. We will discuss the complex infrastructural media of voyages on land, sea, and in the air (often together), oral and written accounts (some Indigenous, others Western, often in their intersections), mapmaking, publishing protocols, tourism, early guidebooks, and developments in reproductive media technologies — from wood engraving to chromolithography to photography — using period documents at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Toronto Public Library. Theoretical perspectives from media theory, eco-critical art history, and analyses of empire, imperialism, and colonialism will be examined in the context of illustrated travel publications.

Analogy and metaphor are central to the way humans think and make sense of the world, whether in culture (the pattern is common in literature, music, and architecture), politics, or science (Rutherford's foundational analogy between the atom and solar system, for example). People think analogically because it is a potent shorthand that makes a connection, a comparison. It places its terms in useful but also restrictive ways. Art and Analogy investigates a fundamental range of questions in art history and the practice of artmaking: in what ways are art objects, the processes of their making, and their reception analogues? How is art related to the world: as a mirror, a material segment, a copy? Perhaps digital technologies have altered the nature of art itself by challenging the ancient pattern by which the arts are compared and ranked ("Ut Pictura Poesis," for example). We will also examine how the narratives that make up art history are extensively based on analogical thinking, including the pattern that sees artist X as the artist Y of country Z ("Tom Thomson was the van Gogh of Canada," for example). Are such analogies helpful? In what ways can they be misleading? Can we validly analogize across cultures and temporalities, as when Liu Haisu was dubbed the "Cézanne of China"? While analogizing is ubiquitous and forms a link between art history, the visual arts, and both scientific and humanistic cultural norms generally, we will seek to understand the roots and implications of analogical thinking in visual art and writing about art from c. 1700 to the contemporary period.

Digital technology has greatly changed the way we make, circulate, receive, and study art. From PowerPoint handouts, Instagram, TikTok, to Google image search, many students of art history use applications and platforms daily in their work and life. Moreover, new technologies such as AI are changing the production and dissemination of images, many of which challenge the pre-existing definitions of "Art." This course encourages students to turn an inquisitive and critical eye toward these activities that are often taken for granted. Instead of approaching digital art history, digital art, and contemporary digital visual culture as separate domains of study, this course encourages students to pay close attention to how their assumptions of the digital, their working habits of digital tools, and the potential of art historical inquiry interact.

This course will introduce students to key texts from the 2000s onwards associated with what has been described as the "vernacular turn" in the history of photography. The focus of much of the class will be the category of 'family photography' with some discussion and comparison with other genres within the vernacular framework. Throughout, we will return to the question 'what is a vernacular photograph?' and will use case studies from the Royal Ontario Museum's South Asian and Family Camera photo collections, alongside visits to other Greater Toronto Area collections. The class will examine photo history from its beginnings in 1839 to the present day, including studio and amateur photography, as well as work by contemporary artists. It will allow students to examine the social, economic, and cultural practices that produce vernacular photography, while trying to understand its aesthetic and discursive dimensions.

This course explores the significant contributions and profound influence of the legendary California multimedia artist Wallace Berman (1926-1976) and the wide network of post-World War II counter-cultural artists with whom he was associated. This network was reviewed extensively by Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna in their important exhibition and catalogue, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and his Circle (2005). The first part of the course focuses on how Berman established himself as a key figure in the Beat cultures of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1950s against the backdrop of the Cold War devoting himself to his private mail art publication Semina that released nine issues starting in 1955. The second unit explores Berman's work while based in Topanga Canyon beginning in 1963 where he worked on his innovative photo-based art (collages utilizing a Verifax copy machine) and where he was immersed in the West Coast hippie counterculture sixties scene. The course situates Berman at the crossroads of such intellectual currents as Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), the reception of French Surrealism, post-war experimental film, Pop art and music, Beat poetry, and assemblage art while examining Berman's connections to key artistic figures in a variety of media such as Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Allen Ginsberg, Jay DeFeo, Marjorie Cameron, Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, Jack Hirschman, and David Meltzer, among others. Specific comparisons will be made between his Verifaxes and other photo-collage practices in the same period including the work of Robert Heinecken, Penny Slinger, Romare Bearden, and Peter Blake (who included Berman in the countercultural pantheon on the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Hearts Club Band in 1967). As a post-script, the course will reflect on Berman's prophetic emblem of the hand holding a transistor radio emitting an overload of visual signs in the light of contemporary media and of life in the age of the smart phone.

This course investigates the dynamic relationship between photography and the natural, physical, and human sciences in the 19th century. We will be concerned with a number of pressing questions: How did photography compete and collaborate with other modes of scientific representation for the mantle of authority? How did scientific photography enter into the canon of the history of photography, and at what cost? What role did the medium play in the rise of scientific professions, and in science education? How did photography complicate or clarify the categories of scientific realism and anti-realism? Ultimately, we explore varied strategies of the production of scientific knowledge by photographic means, and the cultural and social implications of these activities.

In 1921 the Russian structuralist Roman Jakobson lamented that the history of art was remarkably imprecise in its vocabulary. One word received particular disapprobation: "the term 'realism'…fares especially badly. The uncritical use of this word, so very elusive in meaning, has had fateful consequences." In this seminar, we will address the consequences that have attended the invocation and variability of "realism" by examining a series of episodes in Western art from the late medieval and early modern periods to the 20th century. We will explore — and attempt to disentangle — the most influential historical and theoretical accounts of realism and its relatives, including mimesis; naturalism, the comic, pictorial realism; social realism; photo-realism and photography. We will examine the invocation of these terms with respect to such phenomena as medieval sculpture, Van Eyck, Caravaggio, Dutch genre painting, Courbet, nineteenth-century photography, and cubism. The fundamental aim of this exercise is to become familiar with the various discourses around notions of realism, to assess how disparate artists have sought to link visual representation with the world. Meetings will be organized around readings from Boccaccio, Rabelais, Johan Huizinga, Lorraine Daston, Roman Jakobson, Erich Auerbach, Ernst Gombrich, Roland Barthes, John Tagg, and other relevant writers. Students will be evaluated on their participation in weekly discussions, oral presentations, and final paper.