Familiarization with the means of architectural and artistic expression of medieval, renaissance and post-renaissance (manierism, baroque) art. Sensibilization and acquirement of basic knowledge for the comprehension of western art and architecture.
The course investigates the long period of architectural and artistic creation which corresponds to period from the end of late antiquity till the mature baroque. The aim is to achieve comprehension of the expressive means of the creators, as of the theoretical framework. We discuss the tendencies and forms of architecture and art shaped during this dense millennium. We focus upon four main periods of artistic expression, known by the conventional terms of Roman and Gothic Art, Art of the Renaissance (early, high and mannerism) and Baroque. Their development and evolution is not linear in a chronological sense, nor geographically limited.
The particularities of the medieval world are taken into account: the establishment of the Christian environment and the papal state, the survivals and revivals of antiquity, the local differentiations, multiculturalism, national traditions and the numerous influences of other doctrines or religions, profane or religious, coexisting under the gradually increasing influence of humanism, philosophy and the sciences.
•David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture (translated as Ιστορία της δυτικής αρχιτεκτονικής, ΜΙΕΤ, Athens 2009 [1996].
•E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (translated as Το χρονικό της τέχνης, ΜΙΕΤ, Αθήνα1994 [1989].
[Further bibliography will be given during courses]