Online Art History 2022-2023

The course offers an introduction to the intersections of art and Christianity, from the earliest days of the institution to the present. Through detailed examination of art and architecture, students will engage with some the church’s earliest debates and conversations, defining the spaces in which Christians worshipped and central identity of Christianity as it existed both in experience and in the imagination of people throughout its 2000-year history. Whereas Judaism and Islam restrict the making of images, Christianity was one of the greatest patrons of the arts, recognising visual culture’s intrinsic power in shaping the minds of the faithful and potential converts. The strategies the Church employed were innovative and successful, but always remined debated and significantly contributing the urge towards Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

During the late medieval period, women played a defining role in the commissioning, making and experiencing of devotional art and architecture. This course explores the opportunities nuns, sisters, mystics, wives and widows had to express their faith, status and power by material means. Equally it focuses on the way in which such devotional works could shape women’s visions and modes of contemplation. Case studies are drawn from across Europe, with a primary focus on Italy and Germany during the period 1150-1500.

The nineteenth century saw an unprecedented rise of interest in Christian art. This course will focus on nineteenth-century artistic reform movements such as the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites, the ‘Gothic Revival’, and its intersections with theological movements such as the “Oxford Movement”.

We will focus on themes such as Medievalism; the revival of historic media such as stained glass and fresco painting; and the rising interest in Biblical history painting, and how this intersected with new discoveries in the field of Biblical archaeology, as well as with the aesthetic of Orientalism.

This core course considers the aesthetic tradition within biblical and systematic theology. Traditions of iconography will be discussed as will ideas of participation and semiotic theory. It offers an overview of the figures and movements in theological aesthetics beginning in Hebrew and bronze age concepts of the representation of the deity running to figures such as Augustine, Aquinas, Eastern traditions, The Reformers, Counter Reformers, Barth, von Balthasar featuring along the way.

Preparation for 18,000-word dissertation written on a topic related to the student's taught Master's programme and agreed to by the supervisor and the programme co-ordinator.

A dissertation written on a topic related to the student's taught Master's programme and agreed to by the supervisor and the programme co-ordinator.

The course will examine Scottish painting of the 150 year period following the Act of Union against the background of Scotland's changing position as a cultural centre within the United Kingdom. It will discuss changing patterns of patronage, links with England and continental Europe and the effects of Union on Scottish painting.