Week 1: The Renaissance: Humanist Thought and Representation
We will begin by looking at Early German woodcuts and chapbooks and their illustration of religious themes. We will then examine the development of Renaissance engraving in the context of humanist thought and visual culture, paying attention to Mantegna, Durer, Diana Mantuana, and Elisabetta Sirani.
Week 2: Social and Political Revolutions
We will explore print practice in the context of the printing press’s invention and the Protestant Reformation, looking at how engravings and woodcuts served as propaganda for religious reform, in the fight against witchcraft, and as documents for producing and disseminating scientific knowledge.
Week 3: From the Rococo to the Enlightenment to Romanticism
We will look briefly at some of the inventions and innovations in visual technology, and at how prints were used in the French Revolution. We will study the shift from the Enlightenment’s focus on rationality to Romanticism’s emphasis on the imagination.
Week 4: The 19th Century: Imagining the Other
We will examine 19th-century representations of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and criminality. How were these Others represented? Among the media we will look at fine art engravings, etchings and woodcuts, photographs, ID cards, mass media illustrations, scientific illustrations, and paintings.
Week 5: The 19th Century: European Print Media
The 19th century saw an avant garde culture develop in the context of Modernism, industrialization, and capitalism with its expansion of consumer culture and mass media. We will consider artistic responses to social and economic change in Daumier’s political cartoons and Japanese woodblocks and their influence on Impressionism.
Week 6: 20th-Century and Contemporary Print Practice
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen an explosion of print media. Our final lecture will examine some of the most influential, including collage, photomontage, photography, Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist printmaking, installations, collaborations, and street art.
