So-long Sophists and Socrates the Visual-Arts as History’s Virtual Vectors

Abstract

Traveling to the Classical Greek Golden Age and back starting from the cinquento High Renaissance, this unit traces “traces” of History in Art, leading students on (necessarily selective) journeys through a 2000 year period of increasingly “European” history. Necessarily left out of account, in our voyage through such a large expanse of time, are much of what was happening in Europe (and European Art) defined widely, particularly in the North, not to mention most of the social and political history of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. While the unit’s focus is Art in History- (or rather History in Art)- three additional topics are explored in parallel procession: they are (a) the Medieval Muslim and Byzantine ‘academic scribblers,’ (b) sport and (c) architecture.