AH 331 - Creative Genius: Art & Architecture in Baroque Rome

This course focuses on the cultural meaning of paintings, sculptures and buildings created in Rome between late 16th and mid-17th centuries, most of them commissioned by the popes but also by cardinals and aristocrats. The close relationship between art and Catholicism, as well as the power of art as a method of communication and self aggrandizement, are illustrated through the examination of works of art produced in the age of the Counter Reformation and by the great masters of the Seicento (for example, Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Rubens, Bernini, Borromini, Pietro da Cortona, Nicolas Poussin, Alessandro Algardi among others). The course aims at emphasizing the complexity of these manifold expressions – hardly included in the label of Baroque – that characterize one of the most lively periods in the history of art.  Moreover, this age greatly contributed to shape Rome as we see it today.