Sexuality, Drama and Invention: The Baroque Artist in Italy

This course focuses on the lives, careers, and works of five famous Italian Baroque artists and architects: Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and Francesco Borromini. Intermittently, we also examine works by some of their important, but perhaps less well known, contemporaries, such as Domenichino, Guercino, and Pietro da Cortona. Special attention is given to the role of sexuality in the artists? lives and works as well as in seventeenth-century culture more broadly, and to the concepts of drama and invention in the theory and practice of Baroque art and architecture.