ARH

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

This course surveys the history of Western Art from the Greek world to the present day, using the question of beauty as a unifying theme. The first class each week will introduce the art or architecture of the period; the second will use readings from period sources to understand how beauty was perceived and defined in that period. The course will have a particular emphasis on theories of beauty that recur in successive historical periods: beauty and mathematics, beauty and function, beauty and color, beauty and mimesis, beauty and effect. This course fulfills the Foundations Program requirement in Fine Art. It also serves as a gateway to the Fortin and Gonthier Core Texts and Enduring Questions Program and/or to a minor in Art History.

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

Typically offered on the Rome campus, this course examines the emergence of Baroque art in the late Cinquecento and early Seicento (16th and 17th centuries) and follows the development of the Baroque style in sculpture, painting and architecture. During the class students study artists including Caravaggio, Bernini and Borromini. Much of the course is taught on-site in Rome, the ‘cradle’ of the Baroque. This course fulfills the Foundations Program requirement in Fine Art.

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

This course examines the art of Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, starting with the Neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David and ending with Impressionism and its impact on the art world. Topics covered will include the invention of photography and its effect on painting; the development of landscape painting in Germany, France and the United States, and the growth of the art market. French art will be the main focus of the course, but we will also be thinking about Francisco Goya in Spain, Romanticism in Germany, the Hudson River School in America, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England.

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

This course examines the development of modern art in Europe and the United States, focusing on the period between 1880 and 1950. Starting with Post-Impressionism, we trace the key movements in modern art (including Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism), and consider some of the more traditional forms against which they defined themselves. In the process, we seek to understand how the terms ‘modern,’ ‘modernist,’ and ‘avant-garde’ came to be applied to art and artists, and to establish what art historians and cultural critics mean when they use them.

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

This upper level, field-based course is designed for juniors and seniors to explore and develop professional opportunities and apply concepts and skills learned in their coursework in art history. Permission of Chair required.

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

From the early 1400s to the late 1600s, the cities of the Low Countries (now Belgium and Holland) were the most exciting urban centers of Northern Europe. Bruges in the fifteenth century, Antwerp in the sixteenth, and Amsterdam in the seventeenth laid the foundations of modern capitalism and produced some of the most dazzling art of any period. This course examines how politics and religion shaped the Low Countries in this period of extraordinary growth, which produced artists of the caliber of Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Vermeer, Judith Leyster, and Rembrandt van Rijn. The Worcester Art 52

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

This course combines a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with an examination of the book’s impact on the development of modern art. Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes how the prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Overman is his successor. In a series of encounters and conversations, Zarathustra expounds and refines his philosophical system, concluding that he himself is the Overman. In the course of his poetic parable, Nietzsche skewers the materialism and mediocrity of late-nineteenth century European society, and proposes that only the creative individual can blaze a path to a better future. Modern artists, out of sympathy with a world that rarely appreciated their work and fed by Romantic notions of the artist as a force for change in society, latched onto Nietzsche’s ideas with passionate enthusiasm, molding them into an image of the avant-garde artist as world-changer.

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu

Special Topics courses in art history are offered occasionally. They respond to special interests evinced by students or the research interests of the faculty.

Subject

ARH

Type

course

Edition

2025-2026

Source

www.assumption.edu