Index#: 19425
Will Count Towards Art History MAJOR
Will Count Towards Art History MINOR
Due to their compelling emotional impact, images have always been tools for propaganda. This interdisciplinary seminar will analyze the power of images and their (mis-)use for political purposes throughout Western history. It will study how the Medici family employed Michelangelo’s David to cement their power over Renaissance Florence and how Bernini’s bust of King Louis XIV developed an ideal image of the Absolutist ruler. Other topics will include the visual rhetoric of Communist and Nazi monuments and Picasso’s Guernica. In addition to such canonical works of “high art,” the seminar will consider popular culture and press photography, including political campaign posters and press photographs such as the picture of the Situation Room with Obama’s staff witnessing the assassination of Osama-bin-Laden. The seminar will thus be of interest not only to art historians but to historians, students of political science and visual culture.
About Professor Paul
Benjamin Paul is a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, focusing on Venetian architecture and painting of the early 16th century. His recent publications include the book Nuns and Reform Art in Early Modern Venice: The Architecture of Santi Cosma e Damiano and its Decoration from Tintoretto to Tiepolo (London, 2012) and the edited volume Celebrazione e autocritica. La Serenissima e la ricerca dell’identità veneziana nel tardo Cinquecento (Rome, 2014). In the latter appeared the study “’Convertire in se medesimo questo flagello’: autocritica del Doge Alvise Mocenigo nel bozzetto di Tintoretto per il dipinto votivo a Palazzo Ducale.” Paul is also working on the tombs of the doges of Venice, on which he is currently editing a volume with the proceedings of a conference he organized. On that topic he recently published the article “Les tombeaux des doges vénitiens: de l’autocélébration dans une République,” in Mémoire monarchique et la construction de l’Europe. Les Funérailles princières en Europe, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. 2. Apothéoses monumentales, ed. Juliusz A. Chrościcki, Mark Hengerer, and Gérard Sabatier (Rennes, 2013), pp. 159-178. His next book project deals with Venetian art in the aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and is entitled “The Agency of Art in the Crisis of Late Sixteenth-Century Venice.”