Art in the Age of Giotto: evidence and interpretation

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Laura Jacobus

This module will consider Italian art of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a period in which most of the representational conventions of western art first took place. It will concentrate on a limited number of major monuments of the period, focusing on issues of historical evidence and interpretation. The authorship and date of many significant projects are unknown, raising particular historiographic issues which will be the subject of close scrutiny. You will be encouraged to assess the validity of technical, documentary and stylistic evidence advanced in the literature concerning these projects. However, the dominance of attributional issues in the extant literature has meant that questions of interpretation have often been neglected or have been conducted within a very limited framework. Expanding the terms of such debates will consequently be another concern.