ARTH 7004 - Rococo to Romanticism: Eighteenth-Century Art

This online course investigates eighteenth-century art and visual culture during the age of the Enlightenment and is enriched by local, national, and international museum and gallery collections. Structured around modules on the period styles of Rococo, Neoclassicism, and Romanticism, topics are framed by the dynamic social, political, and intellectual revolutions of the era. Case studies include changes in art and emotions, decorative arts and mass production, Grand Tourism, printmaking and satire, revolutionary propaganda, art and empire, trade between East and West, and power imbalances in depictions of gender, sexuality, and race. These themes are interrogated with a decolonial lens that challenges and reconstitutes the traditional focus on Europe to encompass multiple art historical narratives of production and reproduction, representation and absence, and past and present reception and interpretation of diverse images and objects in colonial America, Asia, and Australia.