This course explores the creative tension between the impulse for originality and the constraint of authoritative models in the invention of new artistic forms in Western Europe from the decline of Rome to the dawn of the Italian Renaissance, approximately 300-1300 A.D. Representative works–architecture, painting, sculpture, and minor arts–are considered in their totality as experiential wholes and placed within the geographical and cultural contexts of current day Italy, Germany, France, England, and Spain. We will analyze the forms, types, and styles, and the intellectual, theoretical, and cultural contexts of many exemplary monuments and places that are foundational for western art and architecture.

This course, intended for both graduate and undergraduate students, has no prerequisites. Each lecture is normally devoted to one theme and focuses on one building or place. Lectures are enriched with numerous site visits to Harvard repositories and non-Harvard sites in the Boston area.

The lectures are grouped under eight topics.

1. Authority, invention, the Apocalypse, and Carolingian art includes the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. and the rise of a new order under Charlemagne, ca. 800. It includes a consideration of architecture as both style and symbol. 
2. Ottonian and Romanesque art and architecture covers case studies of royal and episcopal patronage in 11th century (modern day) Germany. The structure, engineering, and aesthetics of Romanesque architecture in Germany and Italy are treated through an in-depth analysis of Speyer Cathedral. 
3. Monasticism highlights the great architectural monuments such as Cluny that resulted from this cloistered lifestyle. 
4. Medieval pilgrimage to holy sites that include Jerusalem, Monte Sant’Angelo in southern Italy, and along the routes from north/east France to Santiago de Compostella in north/west Spain. 
5. Gothic architecture, sculpture, and stained glass, traces the development in France with St. Denis and Chartres and then in England with Canterbury Cathedral. 
6. Byzantine architecture and mosaics illustrated through two locations in Italy: Norman Sicily and Venice, both in the 11th and 12th centuries. 
7. Secular architecture of castles and urban form with Florence as the example of the latter. 
8. The dawn of the Renaissance in Italy ca. 1300, revealed by St. Francis of Assisi and the earliest paintings of his life.

The in-class lectures will be available on Canvas as videos (images and narration in sync) and as PowerPoints without narration, for studying the images. A complete list of monuments seen in class is on the course site.