AH20290 Art & Death

Academic Year 2023/2024

(NB. This is an evening lecture module that runs on Monday evenings at Belfield in the Spring 2024, 6-8pm - please make sure that you will be free to attend at this time; the course will combine its cohort with that of the Access and Lifelong Learning Module AE-AN241 - Memory and Mortality In Renaissance and Baroque Art.)
This module examines death as a theme in European art during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. There will be three broad areas of study:
1) Death & Belief: covering portrayals of the Last Judgement, Danse Macabre, Vanitas, and other eschatological themes that illustrate responses to death and the afterlife in an age of religious reform. Artists covered include Giotto, Rogier van der Weyden, Michelangelo, Holbein, Bruegel, Rubens and Bernini.
2) Personalities & Effigies: individualistic responses to the nature of mortality with reference to the development of tomb monuments, effigies and memorial portraiture. Typical themes include Michelangelo's tomb designs, John Donne's monument at St. Paul's Cathedral, London, and royal funerary effigies in France and England. We shall also look at how artists such as Titian responded to their own sense of professional identity in the context of aging and mortality.
3) Decay & Dissection: artworks that reflect an increasingly rational and scientific understanding of the body as a vehicle for existence, particularly in the post-Reformation period. We shall look at the anatomical studies of Leonardo da Vinci, the portrayal of disease in Venetian renaissance painting, and Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp.