This proseminar focuses on artists and authorship in Early Modern Europe. The Early Modern era was a time when the self-conception and identity of the artist was in transition, and when long-lasting tropes about artists were defined. This seminar investigates changes in the notion of ‘the artist’ between c. 1400-1650 from a number of historical and theoretical perspectives. One of the aims of the seminar, for example, will be to consider the literary genre of artistic biography. Another will be to investigate the model of the artist as an all-powerful, heroic figure, a concept that draws upon classical tropes about creativity and divine inspiration. We will consider feminist approaches and other methods of analysing artists not as autonomous geniuses but as a product of discourses, ideologies and power-relationships, engaging with a range of ideas about self-fashioning, identity and subjectivity.
- Course owner: Kathleen Christian