The Body in Art in Early Modern Europe: Power and Limits of Corporeal Representations

This course studies the artistic representations of the human body in many guises: aesthetic, political, social, cultural, and erotic. It analyses the different strategies artists deployed to develop rhetorics of the body both physical and emotional. It considers different media (including painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, architecture, and gardens) and major theoretical frameworks (including feminist theory, phenomenology, social theory and somaesthetics). This course considers the body dynamically through composition, as object of investigation, as locus of meaning and through social understanding. Lectures and discussions are complimented by corporeal performances and improvisations.