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Picturing the Early Modern Print, c. 1400 –

c. 1700Time and Place

COURSE OVERVIEW:

This course confronts the printed image in Western Europe during the early modern period. We will approach our topic from a number of different angles, including techniques of production and distribution,economics and markets, the construction of knowledge, religious practice, artistic theory, notions of reproducibility and “the original”, and the emergence of copyright. Emphasis will be on learning to situate printing practices and printed objects in a socio-historical context.Class time will focus on discussion of assigned readings and images. Students are required to read the assigned texts class and come prepared to discuss them critically. We will also be meeting twice in the Mills College Art Museum’s Prints and Drawings collection, where we will have the opportunity to closely study early modern prints “in real life.”

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

Students’ work can be divided into four parts:

1. Reading:

Reading assignments are outlined in the syllabus and will be made available through the Course Website. Completion of these assignmentsis crucial both for your understanding of the material and for your performance in in-class discussions, presentations and on writing assignments.

Students are asked to read carefully and to approach the texts critically, reading not just for content but also for broader concerns. Harvard University has published online some extremely useful guidelines for developing critical reading skills. Please readthese at the beginning of the semester:http://hcl.harvard.edu/research/guides/lamont_handouts/interrogatingtexts.html

2. Response Papers (20% of Final Grade)

One short (1-2 pages, double-spaced) response paper is due every week.These papers should be in the style of literature reviews for the week’s reading, touching on each author’s subject and general arguments, as well as students’ individual reactions to specific points made in the readings.

3. Class Participation: (20% of Final Grade)

This course will have a midterm consisting of slide identification andtwo essay questions. The latter will require an understanding of boththe lecture material and the required reading.

4. Presentation (20% of Final Grade)

Each student will give a fifteen-minute visual presentation at the endof the semester based on her or his paper topic. While it is not expected that all arguments be fully worked out, students should be able to clearly present the specific issues on which they are working.

The content of the presentation should NOT be merely a summary of information one has read, but rather should bring material together inan original and analytical way. Use the presentation to introduce thearguments that you are considering for your final paper, and to solicit feedback on your ideas.

5. Final Paper (40% of Final Grade)

The Final Paper is a ten- to twelve-page research paper (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 11- or 12-pt font). The topic will be chosen at mid-semester in consultation with the instructor, and should demonstrate an engagement with the themes discussed in class throughout the semester. This paper should reflect a thorough knowledge of previous literature on the topic, but more importantly, it MUST offer original arguments and interpretations.

General and Introductory Literature (these books will be on resever inthe library):

Landau, David, and Peter W. Parshall. The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Riggs, Timothy A., and Larry Silver. Graven Images: the rise of professional printmakers in Antwerp and Haarlem, 1540-1640. Evanston, IL: Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University : Distributed by Northwestern University Press, 1993.

Strauss, Walter L. Chiaroscuro; the clair-obscur woodcuts by the German and Netherlandish masters of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries. London: Thames & Hudson, 1973.

Watt, Tessa. Cheap print and popular piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Wells-Cole, Anthony. Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints, 1558-1625. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Witcombe, Christopher L. C. E. Print Publishing in Sixteenth-century Rome: Growth and Expansion,Rrivalry

and Murder. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008.

COURSE RULES:

Cell phones must be turned off during class. No headphones may be worn in class. If you take notes with your computer,

be sure to mute the sound. If you cannot resist your computer’s temptations (games, email, the internet, etc.), please do your note-taking the old-fashioned way (pen and paper). This is for your own benefit.

Students are bound to follow the College’s Code of Conduct. Dishonesty (including plagiarism), verbal or physical harassment, and other violations will not be tolerated underany circumstances.

Students are responsible for all course material, whether ornot they have been present in class. Deadline extensions will be granted only in legitimate cases and in consultationwith the instructor.

COURSE SCHEDULE

Week 1Tools, Techniques, and Markets

Course Meeting 1: The Harvard reading guidelines:

http://hcl.harvard.edu/research/guides/lamont_handouts/interrogatingtexts.html

Ivins, William Mills, and Marjorie B. Cohn. How Prints Look: Photographs with Commentary. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987, Chapter 1: ‘Relief’, and Chapter 2: ‘Intaglio.’

Course Meeting 2: Landau, David, and Peter W. Parshall. The Renaissance Print, 1470-

1550. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, Chapter 1.

Questions to think about for the response paper: How do the tools used in printmaking determine the visual

qualities of prints? What are the relationships between materials (cost and

availability), demand, and rate of production for prints in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries?

Would you be able to tell a woodcut form an engraving? An engraving from an etching? How?

Week 2Relics, Copies, and Visual Culture

Course Meeting 3: Areford, David S., “Multiplying the Sacred: The Fifteenth-

Century Woodcut as Reproduction, Surrogate, Simulation.” In The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, edited by Peter W. Parshall, 119-155. Washington, D.C.; New Haven: National Gallery of Art; Yale University Press, 2009.

Course Meeting 4: Hamburger, Jeffrey. “In gebeden vnd in bilden geschriben”:

Prints as Exemplars of Piety and the Culture of the Copy in Fifteenth-Century Germany.” In The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe, edited by Peter W. Parshall, 155-90. Washington, D.C.; New Haven: National Gallery of Art; Yale University Press, 2009.

Questions to think about: What is a relic, what is a cult image? How did these

objects ‘work’ for late medieval Christians? Why is it important to be able to physically see these

objects? How were they displayed and experienced in space? What does the reproducibility of devotional prints have to

do with their function? What is visual culture?

Week 3The Print as a Work of Art

Course Meeting 5:MEET IN THE ART MUSEUM

Landau, David, and Peter W. Parshall. The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, Chapter 3

Course Meeting 6: Pon, Lisa. “Prints and Privileges: Regulating the Image in

16th-Century Italy.” Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 6.2 (1998): 40-64.

Questions to think about: How does the market for books at the end of the fifteenth

century influence the visual qualities of prints at that time?

What does printing have to do with the notion of authorship?

(Or, stated differently, why does Dürer start signing his prints?).

Week 4Disegno and Education

Course Meeting 7: Jack, Mary Ann. “The Accademia del Disegno in Late

Renaissance Florence.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 7.2 (1976): 3-20.

Kwakkelstein, M., “Copying Prints” in Belkin, Kristin Lohse,and Carl Depauw. Images of Death: Rubens Copies Holbein. Antwerp: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 2000, 35-57.

Course Meeting 8: Carpo, Mario. “How Do You Imitate a Building That You Have

Never Seen? Printed Images, Ancient Models, and Handmade Drawings in Renaissance Architectural Theory.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 64.2 (2001): 223-33.

Questions to think about: Why is the copying of prints such an important part of

artistic training around 1600? What are the other ways that artists learn their craft? How did prints transmit visual knowledge? What are the

advantages of this transmission for artists and architects? What are the limitations?

Week 5Renaissance Aesthetics

Course Meeting 9: Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the

Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Chapter 1.

Course Meeting 10: Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the

Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Chapter 2.

Questions to think about: Why is Rome such an important site for artists and patrons

after 1500? What are ‘Renaissance aesthetics’ in the visual arts and how

are they disseminated across Europe in the sixteenth century?

Week 6The Reproductive Print

Course Meeting 11: Witcombe, Christopher L. C. E. Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century

Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder. London: Harvey MillerPublishers, 2008. Chapter 1, 19-60.

Course Meeting 12: Lincoln, Evelyn. “Making a Good Impression: Diana Mantuana's

Printmaking Career.” Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1997): 1101-47.

Questions to think about: What impetus do painters have for publishing printed

reproductions of their own works? What levels of authorship were accorded the creators of the

‘original’ vs. the engravers and etchers in these cases? Why are claims of authorship particularly tricky for a woman

to make?

Week 7Production and Markets: Antwerp and Rome

SIGN UP FOR INDIVIDUAL MEETINGS WITH PROFESSOR TO DISCUSS PAPER TOPICS.

Course Meeting 13: Landau, David, and Peter W. Parshall. The Renaissance Print, 1470-

1550. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 220-223. Bowen, Karen Lee, and D. Imhof. Christopher Plantin and Engraved

Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 17-59.

Course Meeting 14:

Witcombe, Christopher L. C. E. Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder. London: Harvey MillerPublishers, 2008. Chapter 2, 61-106.

Questions to think about: What makes a particular city become a center for printing? What factors (geographic, social, economic, etc) facilitate

the inter-city and international print trade?

Week 8Prints as Arguments in the Religious Reforms

Course Meeting 15: Spelman, Leslie P. “Luther and the Arts.” The Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism 10.2 (1951): 166-75. Melion, Walter S. “'Nor my praise to graven images': Divine

Artifice and the Heart's Idol in Georg Mack the Elder's Painted Print of the Trinity.” The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World. Eds. Michael Wayne Cole and Rebecca Zorach. Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. 215-38.

Course Meeting 16:CLASS MEETS AT THE MUSEUM

Muller, Jeffrey M. “Jesuit Uses of Art in the Province of Flanders.” In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, edited by John W. O'Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris and T. Frank Kennedy, 113-56. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Questions to think about: What was the Reformation? The Counter-Reformation? Try to

be able to explain these terms in 2-3 sentences. What roles (religious, political, social) did images play in

within the struggles for religious reform?

Week 9: Structuring Knowledge, Technologies of Power

PAPER ABSTRACT (200-300 WORDS) AND BIBLIOGRAPHY (AT LEAST 8 SOURCES) DUE.

Class Meeting 17: Acheson, Katherine. “Gesner, Topsell, and the Purposes of

Pictures in Early Modern Natural Histories.” In Printed images in early modern Britain : essays in interpretation, edited by Michael Cyril William Hunter, 127-44. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.

Class Meetin 18: Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Habits, Holdings, Heterologies:

Populations in Print in a 1562 Costume Book.” Yale French Studies no. 110 (2006): 92-121.

Questions to think about: How are pictures used to create categories of knowledge?

How do you think this affected the early modern worldview?

Week 10Pictures as Proof: Monsters and Miracles

Course Meeting 19: Emison, Patricia. “Truth and Bizzarria in an Engraving of Lo

stregozzo.” The Art Bulletin 81, no. 4 (1999): 623-36. Nancarrow, Mindy. “The 17th-Century Spanish “Vida”:

Producing Sanctity with Words and Images.” Woman's Art Journal 25, no. 1 (2004): 32-38.

Course Meeting 20: Schroeder, Susan, and Stafford Poole. Religion in New Spain.

Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Chapter 7: Canonizing a Cult.

Questions to consider:

This week, instead of the usual response paper, students should come with their own questions to discuss with the class. These may concernany of the course material leading up to this point.

Week 11:Student Presentations

Week 12: Student Presentations