A developmental, periodizing, regionalist, and heteronormatively inflected approach to idiosyncratic male artist-geniuses such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian has dominated Renaissance art history. Yet given its cross-cultural colonial origins and paradoxical investment in both ‘pagan’ antiquity and Christian humanism, ‘pre-modern’ Renaissance visuality is anything but straightforward. In this circumscribed survey of sixteenth-century art, we will read scholarship invigorated by queer theory, feminist, post-colonial, and gender studies as well as primary sources by pioneering art historians and queer art writers, e.g. Vernon Lee and Walter Pater.

Registration: Previous coursework in art history or early modern history or literature or gender/GLBTQIA studies AND Professor’s permission. Please email a paragraph explaining your interest in/prep. for the course to vanessalyon@bennington.edu by 11/27 OR Office Hours Thurs 11-1.