U.C. Berkeley History of Art

Histart 270

GRADUATE SEMINAR: RUBENS'S HISTORY: READING THE PAST, MAKING THE FUTURE (2-4 units)

Peter Paul Rubens: remarkable intellectual, brilliant painter, important international diplomat (some would say spy), his place at the very center of Baroque Europe is certain. This seminar, though, explores his role not at the center of one time, but at the crux of a temporal continuum, as a figure who reads, interprets, produces and affects history. We will consider Rubens as a scholar of history and of art’s history; as a visual narrator of histories; as an actor in the major political events of his time; and as a political thinker trying to affect the way others conceived of themselves and their own actions in historical terms.

Topics we may cover include: Rubens’s role in creating a history and canon of art as visual language; theories and concrete instances of Baroque painting as politically persuasive rhetoric; historical biography and exemplarity in early Baroque culture; Rubens’s understanding of classical history and its value; the Medici Cycle and the Whitehall Ceiling as political histories; artistic imitation or copying as a form of history-making; narratives of war and violence as instruction or intervention; forms of religious history painting in the Catholic Reformation context.

Please contact instructor in advance (eahonig@berkeley.edu) to receive readings for first class meeting.