ARTH 41.03 European Art 1750-1850
European culture was transformed during the period 1750-1850. The absolutist monarchy established by Louis XIV would end with the traumatic rupture of the French Revolution. Napoleon redrew the map of Europe. The aristocracies that had ruled the West for a millennium, withered as the bourgeoisie and working classes struggled for control. The optimism of the Enlightenment slowly soured into the brooding inwardness of Romantic melancholia. The rise of mass industrial production and consumption would be accompanied by waves of technological and social change that irrevocably altered daily life. European powers pursued global dominance through colonial expansion with renewed vigor and brutality. This course examines these epochal changes through the lends of European cultural production, covering key artistic movements such as the Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism. We will closely analyze major works of art and visual culture alongside primary, historical texts of the period. These will be supplemented with recent scholarship that will help situate the works under investigation within the rich and complex social and intellectual milieu in which they were produced.