HUAS75026 - The Artist and the Mirror: Renaissance Self-Portraits

Course Description

Self-portraits – that is to say likenesses fashioned by artists of themselves – comprise an important subcategory of artistic production in Renaissance Europe, ca. 1300-1600, a period that witnessed a flourishing of developments in portraiture. As with Renaissance portraits more broadly, self-portraits served many functions, visually expressing identity and religiosity; proclaiming status and relationships; conveying information about appearances, commemorating a moment in time or an event, and preserving memory. This one-day course will consider examples of Renaissance self-portraiture from Italy and Northern Europe, particularly the Netherlands and German speaking lands. We will look at self-portraits in an array of media including painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts. Topics we will explore include the social, professional, intellectual, and psychological functions of self-portraits; the origins of self-portraiture in religious art of the period; independent and group self-portraits; hidden and metaphorical self-portraits; and the relation of Renaissance self-portraits to the contemporary “selfie.” Artists to be considered include Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, Benozzo Gozzoli, Sandro Botticelli, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, Michelangelo, Raphael, Parmigianino, Titian, Sofonisba Anguissola, and Lavinia Fontana. Should time permit, self-portraits by seventeenth-century artists Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck will also be discussed.

Course Outline

Recommended texts:

Joanna Woods Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998) ISBN 978-0300075960

Shearer West, Portraiture, Oxford History of Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), paperback ISBN: 978-0192842589.