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It is impossible to imagine our own modern culture without the ideas and technologies that were developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: from the institution of art academies, to the rise of science, to the widespread use and dissemination of images and information through print.
This course will take a wide-ranging approach to the visual culture of this period and, with a particular focus on prints and drawings, we will ask key questions about how artworks were made and distributed, how they were used and understood by different kinds of viewers, and how they formed cultures and kinds of knowledge.
Our focus will range widely over spheres in which art played a role - from looking at art and the significance of medium (print, drawing, painting, sculpture), to art and the discovery of the New World, to art and the rise of science and anatomy. We will visit London's major public collections, including the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, and well as museum prints rooms at the Wellcome Collection, the Courtauld and the Royal Collection at Windsor. In these print rooms we will be able to consult amazing prints, drawings and books that are not on display to the public.