“Romanesque” art: Art, Historicism, Faith, and Travel from Ireland to the Holy Land c. 700-1200

This course explores a pivotal phase of world art. We begin upon the ashes of the ancient world and explore the redevelopment of Europe and the Holy Land upon its (literal and figural) foundations. Exploring art, architecture and literature, we examine the expansion of monasticism into Britain and Ireland and the creation of its famous illuminated books and high crosses; the development of the cult of relics, the extraordinary reliquaries that housed them and the narratives of miracles that they prompted; the related culture of pilgrimage (or crusade) that connected much of the known world; and the visual art of colonial encounter, particularly in relationship to Spain and its Islamic neighbors, and England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland who would be successively colonized into a single polity c. 1300.