Faculty of Arts & Sciences

Examines major works of world architecture and the unique aesthetic, cultural, and historical issues that frame them. Faculty members will each lecture on an outstanding example in their area of expertise, drawing from various periods and such diverse cultures as modern and contemporary Europe and America, early modern Japan, Mughal India, Renaissance and medieval Europe, and ancient Rome. Sections will develop thematically and focus on significant issues in the analysis and interpretation of architecture.

Surveys the arts of Japan from the prehistoric period to the nineteenth century. Includes Japanese painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as calligraphy, garden design, ceramics, and prints. Essential themes include the relationship between artistic production and Japanese sociopolitical development, Sino-Japanese cultural exchange, and the impact of religion, region, gender, and class on Japanese artistic practice.

This is an introduction to the arts of South and Southeast Asia from the second millennium BCE to the present. Each lecture will examine selective artifacts and sites to understand the history of major artistic traditions developed in response to cultural exchanges and political dynamics within and beyond the region. By examining a wide range of material, such as Buddhist sculptures, Hindu temples, Jain manuscript paintings, Islamic tombs, calendar art, and so on, with fundamental art historical questions, we will consider what makes the arts of South and Southeast Asia unique as well as universal in the twenty-first century context.

Charts the rise and dissemination of a classical architectural vocabulary in Renaissance Europe and its colonial empire. Lectures focus on the development of the style, its origin in the fascination with antiquity, its response to shifts in social and political life, its mechanisms of transmission (travel, book and print culture, objects) as well as phenomena of exchange, export, and resistance to this pan-European trend in the Mediterranean, Latin America and Asia.

Over half the world's inhabitants live in urban environments. Understanding, engaging, and re-imaging the urban condition, with all its complexities, structures, processes, and idiosyncrasies has become a pressing issue for architects, landscape architects, and urban designers alike. This studio will focus on the urban condition as a byproduct of the connections between both human and nonhuman frameworks (systems + environments). Using diagramming and mapping processes, both iteratively and speculatively, students will investigate system-environment relationships through the examination of qualities, behaviors, and territories for a select set of urban agents. Each investigation will reveal latent, suppressed, emerging, provisional, and otherwise unmapped connections, which influence the formation of urban spaces, infrastructures, and technologies. Course material is presented through a series of exercises, lectures, workshops, and reviews, which introduce students to the application of foundational design principles and critical design strategies. This course fosters the development of a design methodology founded on thoughtful, creative, ethical and sustainable practices, and explores meaningful expressions for the built environment.

Tutorial consisting of weekly meetings with designated faculty, where regular reading and writing assignments are focused on a topic of mutual interest.

In the fall term, HAA 99 includes several group tutorial meetings with the senior honors adviser, where assignments are aimed at facilitating the writing of a senior honors thesis; spring term consists of independent writing, under the direction of the individual thesis adviser.

Critical examination of the arts of the book, portable arts, and architecture sponsored by the Timurids (1370-1507), a dynasty founded by Timur (Tamerlane). Emphasis will also be given to primary written sources in translation.

In 1960 the Harvard Art Museums acquired an album composed of sketches, designs, and finished drawings (no. 1960.161). The 57 album folios preserve these valuable resources, with the artworks arranged singly or in groups on each page. The corpus constitutes the materia technica used by artists to make objects in different media, principally lacquered pen boxes and mirror cases, which were purchased from the bazaar by members of Qajar society and Europeans who visited Iran between the early 1800s and 1900s. The album has not yet been the subject of close study, despite the fact that it is the richest resource of its kind known today. The goal of the seminar is to examine the album and its contents from different perspectives, the period in which it was made, to prepare for the album's exhibition and publication as a monograph in 2017.

The banquet is the key event of Roman elite society. It involved not only luxurious and well-staged food and wine, but proper behavior, a decent setting, luxury furniture, entertainment and enchantment. The seminar discusses visual, archaeological and literary evidence to explore the sensual culture of the Roman dinner party - oscillating between strict social rules, intellectual table talks, the theatrical orchestration of high cuisine, revelry, eroticism and bodily excess.

In second-century Rome, Greek Myths enter a new sphere: tombs. But the mythological narratives adorning the imperial relief sarcophagi are more than traditional tales being retold. Their original visual language, combining Greek and Roman motifs, turns the caskets into powerful mediators that help express central experiences of life and death. In this seminar we will examine the complex imagery of Roman sarcophagi and interpret the mythological narratives from different perspectives – contextual, cultural, social, and philosophical.

Courtly culture and patronage in Paris, Prague, and Burgundy, with an emphasis on issues of artistic exchange, dynastic commemoration, princely piety, the development of secular genres, and the emergence of the court artist.

Taught from the collection of Books of Hours in the Houghton Library, the course will teach students how to describe and study medieval manuscripts and introduce various aspects of these richly illuminated prayer books. Special attention to the texts and images in the context of later medieval painting and piety within longer traditions of picturing prayer extending back deep into the Middle Ages.

German monumental sculpture from the 11th through 13th centuries in its broader European context using the cast collection in Adolphus Busch Hall.

An architectural history of Rome from the empire through the early Christian and medieval city, the Renaissance revival of antiquity, Baroque planning, and early archeology to Fascism and modernism, including the imperial fora, aqueducts, fountains, medieval basilicas, the piazza, villas, gardens, St. Peter's and the Vatican complex.

Colloquium aimed at undergraduates on the Vatican palace including the Fran Angelico's chapel for Nicholas V, the Raphael stanze, the Loggia of Raphael, the Sistine Chapel including the Michelangelo frescoes and the Raphael tapestries, the Cortile del Belvedere, Julius II's statue court and collections, the Tower of the Winds and Gallery of Maps, the Vatican Library, the Vatican Museums, as well as an overview of old and new St. Peters under Bramante, Michelangelo, Maderno and Bernini

This course is an introduction to designed landscapes, and landscape architecture since 1850. Thematic lectures will focus on the history and theory of designed landscapes in the Western world. They will also address landscape creations of the Eastern civilizations and of other time periods as they become relevant for the topics and objects discussed in this class. Students will be able to develop critical and formal analytical skills that facilitate the reading and interpretation of designed landscapes as both physical spaces and as cultural media that sit at the nexus between art and science.

This course explores Vienna in its golden age (1890-1938) through attempts by its leading lights-including Klimt, Schiele, Freud, Wittgenstein and Schonberg-to imagine a new architecture of home. At once a built environment and a subjective inwardness, the Viennese interior was a blueprint of dwelling and of exile for our modern world.

This course will examine artistic production in the US and Europe between 1945 and 1975 to clarify some of the most crucial questions of this thirty year period: How did post war visual culture repress or acknowledge the recent 'caesura of civilization' brought about by World War II?; how did the neo-avantgarde position itself with regard to the legacies of the avantgardes of the 1920s?; how did artistic production situate itself in relation to the newly emerging apparatus of Mass Media culture?

The course revolves around close looking at twelve Chinese artworks from Harvard Art Museums. The objects to be examined range from the Neolithic period to the twentieth century. They anchor larger horizons, opening up hidden historical dimensions. Students learn to interrogate artworks by forming fruitful questions and identifying leads that take them to deeper cultural historical contexts. It will be demonstrated that artworks yield insights into a culture in a palpable way unobtainable from texts.

The course explores the history of Indian painting based on the collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We will investigate the theory of pictorial form in India and its relationship to the society at large against the historical currents by probing the development and changes in artistic styles and material culture of painting production. We will pay particular attention to the role of media, such as palm-leaf, birch bark, paper, and pigments, along with consideration of changing symbolic and material meanings of color. Regular visits (sections) to the museums and conservations labs to examine the paintings in person are to be scheduled throughout the semester.

This seminar will critically examine the depiction and contextualization of individuals of African descent in European and American art. Among the various issues raised are historic changes in the idea of and construction of race, the impact of early internationalism, notions of difference in the age of exploration, slavery and notions of selfhood, and representation as part of the larger colonial project.

This seminar addresses questions of cultural display through the art and architecture of world fairs, mid-nineteenth century to present. Students are introduced to the seminal fair events beginning with the Crystal Palace in London, and extending to fairs in the U.S., France, Belgium, Spain, Japan and China. the history of fairs as artistic and social phenomenon is explored along with how these events shaped national identity, ethnicity, social class, race, imperialism, colonialism, and gender.

Architecture of the eastern Mediterranean basin (at Italian, Ottoman, and Mamluk courts) with emphasis on cross-cultural encounters and transmission of the Romano-Byzantine heritage, science and technology, architectural practice, ornament, urban design, military, religious and domestic architecture.

Texts of the Persian literary tradition that were illustrated constitute our focus, including Firdawsi's Shahnama and Nizami's Khamsa. Study of word and image is staged through key examples to open new lines of inquiry.

The course will focus on domestic life and environment in everyday Byzantine society. Course topics will examine the private as well as public life of the individual from childhood to adult life, through artifacts from the household, as well as education, work, and other social contexts.

A wide-ranging introduction to critical approaches to the study of medieval art, with emphasis on systems of signification, mixing historiography and methodology in a workshop format in which students help set the agenda.

Since its beginnings, the history of art has been conceived of as a teleological process defined largely in terms of progress, culminating in the triumph of modernism. As a counter-heuristic, we will teach the history of art from the present and looking back to the past. After an historiographical introduction, focused on Vasari, Winckelmann, Hegel and historicism, also in reverse, each section will consist of a critical chain of appropriations made by modern artists who constructed their own understanding of tradition, ending in Antiquity. Each section will focus on a major artist.

The architectural book and its readers, authors, circulation and manufacture in the early modern period.

Explores painting as the privileged medium and institution of artistic modernity (from the late 17th c to the present). Issues: Color; Liveliness; Truth; Autonomy; Subjectivity; Touch; Blindness; the Ready-Made; the Post-Medium Condition.

Emergence, development, reception, and legacy of Cubism in Paris between 1907 and 1937, focusing on Picasso, Braque, Leger, and Gris, the four major artists of the pioneering Galerie Kahnweiler. Having analyzed the fundamental role of primitivism, tradition, mass culture, and the commodity form in Cubism's genesis, our major endeavor is to unpack its ever-shifting relation to its aesthetic Others, namely, abstraction, decoration, the ready-made, realism, and monumentalism. Crucial to this endeavor is a thorough examination of the problem of medium in Cubism, considering not only drawing, easel painting, collage, and constructed sculpture, but also mural painting, architecture, photography, and film.

This term: Great Britain, Scandinavia , Austria, and the Benelux countries. Addresses the artistic responses to the legacies of Surrealism, to American mass culture, and to the impact of Fascist domination.

A central preoccupation of later aesthetic theory and the history of art has been the precise nature of the relationship between the work of art and everyday life. This seminar focuses on the initial embrace of, and later assault on, orthodox modernism's faith of art as an autonomous institution by the constellation of movements known collectively as the Russian and Soviet Avant-Gardes

The seminar addresses the changing aesthetic theories that emerged during the Weimar Republic and its aftermath in exile, in the work of some of the key philosophers and art historians, from Georg Lukacs, to Siegfried Kracauer, from Carl Einstein to T.W. Adorno and Aby Warburg.

Graduate seminar exploring the intersection of the field of art history with the globalized art world. What is "contemporary art" - in theory, in practice, and in history?

Utilizes a critical consideration of William Kentridge's work for the purpose of imagining new paradigms for writing about art. Explores Kentridge's range and understanding of media, his primary sources (visual, musical, and literary), his links to European modernism and Renaissance traditions, and his self-presentation in performances, lectures, and writings.

The seminar explores the idea of playing by the "book" in design. The "book" is a set of rules embedded in classical Chinese texts. It will be demonstrated that the principle extrapolated from the "book" informs various designs in traditional China. The instructor and students work together to identify new leads in the core readings and visual materials, devise and revise the master plan and narratives, and push the central storyline to new horizons.

This seminar explores the art of Indian Esoteric Buddhism from various interpretive vantage points. After a brief survey of the earliest phase of its development, the discussion will focus on unpacking the recent scholarly discourses on Esoteric or Tantric Buddhism in relation to the artistic productions in medieval South Asia (ca. 800-1200CE). The two main topics for the semester will be the Saiva-Buddhist interactions as manifested in iconographic (and artistic) articulations, and the validity of semiotic and historical interpretations of iconography and ritual of Indian Esoteric Buddhism.

Explores relic-inspired medieval Chinese visual programs from the seventh to tenth century. The scope encompasses Japan and Korea wherever applicable. Key issues include the making of algorithm behind the artistic programming derived from relic lore and the elaborate regimens that enable the "body" to evolve into new states of being.

This seminar examines art in Japan from the mid nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the visual arts, performance art, commercial design, and new media. Topics to be addressed include the reception of European beaux-arts institutions and artistic practices, international expositions, the role of art in the formation of the nation-state, the rise of the avant-garde, art and mass culture, and Japanese exhibition culture.

This seminar explores the work of the Japanese artist Tawaraya Sotatsu (active ca. 1600-1640). Emphasis will be placed on an intermedia approach that examines his paintings vis-as-vis other kinds of artistic surfaces.

Individual work in preparation for the General Examination for the PhD degree or, by arrangement, on special topics not included in the announced course offerings.

A series of team-taught workshops designed to sharpen skills in the observation, analysis, and historical interpretation of works of art and architecture.