Making Sense of the 'Classical' in Art

Overview

What you will study

The Making Sense of the 'Classical' in Art course offered by The Courtauld Institute of Art aims firstly to engage critically with the narratives that helped establish a certain type of ancient art as the archetype in the early modern and modern imagination. Secondly, we shall investigate a much more diverse range of art works in the Graeco-Roman world and the context of the social and political developments that influenced their production.

In lectures, seminars and during afternoon visits to relevant London collections, students will become acquainted with some of the best-known examples of classical art, such as in statuary, the Laocoön group, the Apollo Belvedere, the Medici Venus, the Farnese Hercules, and the Parthenon sculptures (‘Elgin marbles’) whose presence in the British Museum is now so disputed. In addition, they will also encounter a representative range of more domestic arts and crafts, including but not limited to, sculpted and painted portraiture, and decorative wall paintings such as those excavated in the eighteenth century in Pompeii and Herculaneum.