Global artistic culture

This course consists of three blocks.

Included in the first block is a study of history, art, and religion in the ancient world and antiquity. We will be talking about the emergence and the particular characteristics of the first civilizations. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Phoenicia, the Creto-Mycenaean civilization, ancient Greece and ancient Israel, Persia, and ancient Rome. We will be talking about what our ancient ancestors looked like, what they believed, what they created and what remains of them and their legacy.

The second block spans approximately a thousand years from the fall of the Roman Empire to the discovery of the Americas. Europe and Asia, Knights and Samurai, Scandinavian sagas and eastern tales, pre-Columbian America and the birth of Islam, the legends of the Knights of the Round Table, Beowulf and The Poem of the Sid, Romantic and Gothic architecture, the Mongol conquests, Kievan Rus’ and its neighbours...This is far from the complete list into which we will delve. We will examine, analyze, and describe art and everyday life.

The third block consists of the study of the modern era, from c.1500 to c.1800. We will start with the Renaissance and its remarkable paintings and architecture, and we will talk about the Age of Discovery. Great artists and navigators, pirates and scholars, conquistadors and colonizers, the Inquisition and the Reformation, revolution in Europe and the Time of Troubles in Russia. We will be endeavouring to examine all these events cumulatively, grasp how what was occurring in the New World affected the Old World, and understand what was happening at the same time in the east from the perspective of history and art. Your teacher will use a large number of visually illustrative material on architecture, sculpture, and painting as well as objects of material culture from various cultures and eras.