BA Programme: Third Arts (2011-12)
The Arts-III programme in the History of Art is challenging and rewarding. It is designed to bring your knowledge and skills in the subject to a higher level, building on the foundations laid in the first and second years of study. The core courses focus on broad questions within the discipline: HA3025 investigates the history of drawing from the Renaissance to the present; HA3015 examines questions of method, theory, and approach. The special-subject options—HA3005, HA3006, HA3020, HA3021, HA3023, HA3024, and HA3026—offer the freedom to shape your final-year programme to suit your individual interests and to investigate particular issues in the context of a skill-based, small-group learning environment. Buttressing the teaching are study tours and field trips to Berlin, Dublin, London, and Rome. Lastly, the supervised research project, HA3013, will provide the opportunity to undertake a significant piece of writing under the supervision of an art historian from the teaching team. Three pathways are on offer:
During the pontificates of Julius II (reg 1503-13) and Leo X (reg 1513-21), ideas about Rome’s majestic past were deliberately revived into an even more glorious present. This course investigates the volatile forces—social, political, cultural—that converged on the ‘Eternal City’, generating the heroic vision of the modern Rome of the popes and fuelling the creative endeavour of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bramante, whose works in painting, sculpture, and architecture gave visual expression to Rome’s status as the capital of the Christian world and the intellectual centre of the West.
A class trip to Rome is planned.
This module examines the impact on art practice of the aesthetic theories of Winckelmann and Burke in relation to Neo-Classicism and Romanticism. The module focuses on key political and social issues such as the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, and the emerging relationship between western and non-western cultures. The course also investigates the wide variety of responses made to these issues within the context of academic art.
The module provides you with the opportunity to develop a particular line of research within the visual arts and to extend your skills of interpretation and analysis. A member of staff will supervise your 8,000-word project, the title of which must be agreed prior to a notified date in the first teaching period and which should be submitted to the Art History office by the last working day in April 2012.
HA3015 Approaches to the History of Art
The course engages with a series of specific debates, or better art-historical problems, which provide an opportunity to examine the rich variety of approaches and at times conflicting methods of enquiry that characterise the discipline. Among the topics to be addressed are Art as History, Aesthetics, Style, Iconography, Semiology, Modernity, Gender, Deconstruction, and Museology.
HA3020 Themes in Roman Baroque Art
The module frames Italian art of the early modern era within the context of the tumultuous upheavals and reforms that took place in the church and state following the Council of Trent. Thematic in approach, the seminars focus on the work of key artists of the period, including Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and Gianlorenzo Bernini, vis-à-vis coeval theories of naturalism, the heroic ideal, and antiquarianism. We will also question the larger terms within which early-modern artists have been discussed, especially in recent scholarly approaches.
A class trip to Rome is planned.
This course will analyse Irish paintings, drawings and prints from the eighteenth century in the context of the major contemporary movements in European art. Special attention will be paid to the work of George Barrett, James Barry, Thomas Roberts, William Ashford and Hugh Douglas Hamilton. The importance of the Grand Tour and the dominance of
A class trip to Dublin is planned.
HA3023 Themes in Modern Art (Paroxysms of Modernity: From Dada to Dictatorship)
This module examines the art of the Weimar Republic, beginning with Dada and Expressionism in the immediate postwar period and ending with the advent of National Socialism in 1933. We will consider a range of artistic practices and media in their localized historical contexts, including postwar Expressionist film, New Objectivity, the Bauhaus, left-wing photography and photomontage. Among the themes we will consider are capitalist consumer culture and aesthetics, the politics of technological mass reproduction, and representations of gender.
A class trip to Berlin is planned.
HA3024 Makers' Myths: The Artist's Persona After 1945
Tormented soul, detached ironist, complicit sell-out, shamanic border-crosser, or fervent revolutionary: this seminar explores some of the most compelling roles that artists have adopted in the post-war period. Through a sequence of specific case studies, we will explore key debates concerning the interpretation of art and the social function of the artist after 1945. How far are artists able to influence the interpretation of their own work? What effect does their own ‘myth-making’ have on their audience? How can we account for changes in the perceived credibility of different artistic personae, and how do these changes bear witness to the shifting fortunes of the post-war avant-garde?
HA3025 From Disegno to the Digital Age: Episodes in the History of Drawing since the Renaissance
This module explores some key episodes in the history of drawing from its emergence as an independent artistic practice during the Renaissance, to the current swell of interest in its potentials for contemporary art. Drawing is at once both central and marginal to the history of art: it has been conceived as the practice which most directly reveals the creative process and the inner workings of the artist, but (until recently) drawings have for the most part been considered as merely preparatory to the larger, more expensive and more permanent achievements of painting and sculpture. Here drawing provides an unfamiliar lens through which to view a wide historical terrain. Paying close attention to particular objects, we will consider works by canonical figures as Leonardo, Rembrandt and Blake, as well as more modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Eva Hesse and William Kentridge.
A class trip to
HA3026 The Art of Medieval Ireland, c.650-1169
The module places Irish art within the context of the spread of Christianity, in the midst of the battles and cattle-raiding which characterised secular medieval society. The seminars examine critically key works, from the Tara Brooch and Book of Kells, to the Cross of Muiredach and Cormac's Chapel, as well as artistic preoccupations with concealed meaning, abstraction of forms, and ornament. We will discuss recent scholarly trends and problematize the conception of Irish art as marginal, against a central canon.
