Syllabus
GENERAL OVERVIEW (selected topics):
- Introduction: Representing Human Body
SECTION I.: From Renaissance to William Hogarth
- Between Plato and Ficino: philosophical origins of “figura serpentinata”
- Between Michelangelo and Lomazzo: (de)erotizing bodies
SECTION II.: From William Hogarth to hygienic imperatives
- Lomazzo’s influence on Hogarth
- Movement and eroticism in Hogarth’s “The Analysis of Beauty”
- Unexpected consequences of Hogarth’s mistakes: William Hogarth as the father of the “modern line”
- Hygienic discourse of the 18th century: clean outlines of the healthy bodies
- Art Nouveau and its implications: “figura serpentinata” runs wild
SECTION III.: 20th and 21th Century Aftermaths
- “Cloud turn” in art: the demise of the line and the victory of the flesh
- Uncomfortable bodies: architectural drawing imperatives
- Fascist reactions: individual erotic wilderness vs. hollow social bodies
- Figura serpentinata and the contemporary anatomical imagination: spirituality held in check
- Between war and pornography: contemporary survivals of the renaissance concepts
Annotation
What does Botticelli’s Venus have in common with the contemporary Instagram stars? How did the influential renaissance concept of “figura serpentinata” become a pornographic backbone of contemporary sexual imagery? How did Michelangelo’s infernal orgies survive into the present time, disguised as the images of destruction? While addressing these questions, the course will provide a practical introduction to iconology as it has been defined and practiced by Aby M. Warburg and Ernst Cassirer in the 1920s and 1930s.
Concerning their mutually influenced methodology, the course will interpret the critical aspects of the “nameless science” by (and while) exposing and analyzing complicated genealogy of the specific spectrum of surprisingly interrelated images like selfies, underwear advertising, cloud imagery, abstract painting, war atrocities or hygiene-related illustrations.