This course will enrich your knowledge of the arts in France from their origin to the present. Through this chronological approach to studying art history all the important movements are touched upon and placed in their political, economic, social and cultural contexts. In the fall course, you will study the history of France from the dawn of time to the French Revolution, from cave paintings (Lascaux) to the Rococo movement. In the spring course, you will study paintings of the 19th and 20th centuries with emphasis on the works housed in the Orsay Museum in Paris.

Author Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was born in Cuba to Italian parents, and grew up in Sanremo on the Via Francigena. He studied botany at Pavia University but secretly wrote fiction, and worked as a journalist, novelist, and resistance fighter in World War II. This course focuses on selections from Calvino’s writings in various genres including his stories that attempt to express scientific theories such as quantum physics in literary form. Other pieces recreate conversations between Marco Polo and Khubilai Khan.

This class will examine the artistic and architectural monuments of Ancient Rome, including the rise of the Roman Republic, the age of Augustus and the Roman Empire, and the origins of Christianity within the late-antique period.  Students will learn about the social, cultural and artistic foundations of Roman culture, combining classroom sessions with visits to many of the city’s most important and impactful monuments (the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, and the Colosseum, to name only a few).  This course will help students see the city around them in a new light, revealing the lasting

This course is a survey of High Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque painting, focusing on the examples that are visible in the churches and museums of Rome. Key figures will include Raphael, Michelangelo, Vasari, the Carracci, Caravaggio, Guercino, Guido Reni, Peitro da Cortona and Giovanni Battista Gaulli. Key themes include the development of the illusionistic frescoed ceiling, the projection of religious and political messages in the age of the counterreformation, classicism and its opposites, and the stylistic revolution of the baroque.

This course will use the magnificent architecture of Rome and its environs to help students understand the broad historical trajectory of western culture.

This course offers you a journey through the rich pageant of Renaissance art and culture, giving you the critical tools with which to analyze, understand and appreciate more fully the works of art produced in central Italy from the mid-thirteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries. We will look closely at the way in which changing styles in art reflected contemporary history and cultural attitudes.

Over the last 30 years, Britain has become a vibrant and fertile center for the visual arts. This course attempts to relate the recent confusing range of artistic styles and media, both in Britain and internationally, to the development of "modernism" at the beginning of the 20th century. Because of the speed of communication and travel, new ideas in art spread rapidly and it is therefore impossible to look at modern art in Britain without reference to the art developments in the wider Western world. Consequently, we will look at art in Europe and North America during this course.

This course will provide a detailed study of those painters and sculptors who are deemed British masters/mistresses. Our studies begin in the early 18th century when a distinctive British School emerged and with it the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. This flowering of home-grown talent was supported in the nineteenth century by an increasingly wealthy middle class who wanted to ‘buy British’.

This course highlights how, over the last 30 years, Britain has become a vibrant and fertile international center for the visual arts. Through the work on display in the museums and galleries of London, the course will attempt to relate the current confusing range of artistic styles with the revolutionary ideas of the first 25 years of the twentieth century, the impact of two world wars and more recent social and global events. Some reference will also be made to parallel developments in architecture.