Studies in Art History

This course offers a critical understanding of the founding principles of art criticism and of the development of art history as a humanistic discipline from the Quattrocento to date. The first part will be dedicated to the analysis of the funding principles of art criticism from the early Renaissance to the Neo-classical period in the works of Leon Battista Alberti, Giorgio Vasari, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The second will be dedicated to the analysis of three main lines of inquiry characterizing art criticism and art history in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries: connoisseurship, formalism, and iconology. We will see how these different ways of seeing artworks emerged and coevolved as mutually intersecting in the works of John Ruskin, Giovanni Morelli, Bernard Berenson, Adolf von Hildebrand, Heinrich Wölfflin, Aby Warburg, Lionello Venturi, Erwin Panofsky, Svetlana Alpers, and Michael Baxandall. The third and conclusive part of the course will consider the weight the thought of these authors and scholars still holds on the current methodological debate on the history and criticism of the visual arts.

None

students enrolled for 6 CFU: - U. Kultermann, La storia della storia dell’arte, Milano, 2002 - Reader of the Corso di base students enrolled for 12 CFU: - U. Kultermann, La storia della storia dell’arte, Milano, 2002 - Reader of the Corso di base and Laboratorio

In class

Oral exam

Lecture and class discussions

The course aims to present the main topics of artistic historiography and art criticism from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, with particular attention to the contextualization of the different methodological approaches related to the analysis of works of art. Knowledge will be provided on the main figures that have characterized the historiography of art over the centuries and the methodologies of twentieth-century criticism will be highlighted. Issues of critical lexicon will be dealt with, reconstructing their birth, development and variations. Main topics of the course will be: - Introduction to the discipline (division into periods, methodological approaches, keywords of art criticism) -Age of Humanism (Cennini, Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti, Architectural treatises, biographies, Leonardo) -The sixteenth century (Giorgio Vasari, historiography and Controriforma) -The seventeenth century (Agucchi, Giustiniani, Mancini, Galileo, Ridolfi, Boschini, Baldinucci, Malvasia, Giovan Pietro Bellori, Du Fresnoy, De Piles, Félibien) -The eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century (Maffei, Bottari, Caylus, Winckelmann, Zanetti, Lanzi, d’Agincourt, Quatremère de Quincy, Fiorillo, Cicognara, la scuola di Berlino ) -The nineteenth century (Violet le Duc, Ruskin, Morelli, Cavalcaselle, Kugler, Burckhardt, Semper, Riegl) - Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries pioneers in comparison (Venturi, Wölfflin, Warburg) -Between the two world wars (Schlosser, storici dell’arte e nazismo, Berenson, Focillon) - Art criticism in the United States (Kubler, Pevsner, Friedländer, Krautheimer) -Around the Warburg Institute (Bing, Saxl, Wittkover, Gombrich) -The social history of art -Connoisseurs of XXth century (Berenson, Longhi, Zeri) - Art criticism and cultural heritage in Italy (Toesca, Lionello Venturi, Longhi, Brandi, Argan) -The variety of contemporary methods (Baxandall, Belting, Freedberg, New Art History, Visual Studies, Haskell, Chastel, Previtali, Barocchi, Castelnuovo)

This course does not formally provide for compulsory prerequisites, but to have basic knowledge of the history of art it’s recommended.

-M. Nezzo, G. Tomasella, Dire l'arte. Percorsi critici dall'antichità al primo Novecento, Padova 2020 (solo per le pp. 149-226; pp. 275-334). -Orietta Rossi Pinelli (a cura di), La storia delle storie dell'Arte, Torino, Einaudi, 2014, fino a p. 451.

The course includes both frontal lessons with the use of Powerpoint and classroom exercises dedicated to the analysis of historical sources; therefore attendance is strongly recommended. Non-attending students are required to fully study the two books assigned as the reference bibliography for the exam. Non-Attending students are also required to know the sources presented in class (and published in the teaching materials); non-attending students are therefore advised to also consult the powerpoint materials.

The student's preparation will be assessed on the basis of the following criteria: 1. ability to understand chronologically and thematically the course contents (50%); 2. ability to clearly and precisely explain the contents of the course (25%); 3. ability to use the specific vocabulary of the subject in an appropriate way (25%) The interview includes general questions (see the next field) and the evaluation will be greater the more precise the answer is both in terms of the chronological data and the contents relating to the differences in the critical method.

Lectures will be enriched by the use of PowerPoint presentations, and a series of lessons will be dedicated to classroom exercises in reading and commenting on selected sources of art criticism specifically chosen to complement the course content. The sources discussed will be made available among the teaching materials and will form part of the examination interview.