Studio Art
ART 4000 ROME STUDIO (4 credits)
Instructor: Staff
This experience provides an exciting opportunity for aesthetic and conceptual growth. Fine arts students from various media concentrations are exposed to a wide variety of methods and subjects. Specific content for the studio will be determined by the instructor. Studio criticism and reviews are supplemented by local and international artists as part of the Visiting Artist series in Rome. Emphasis is divided between work accomplished in the studio and work executed in the environs of the city. Media consist primarily of painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and sculpture; or those assigned by the instructor. Fulfills 4 credits of the fine arts concentration requirement for Cornell art majors. Required course. For majors only. Instructor changes according to semester.
ART 3702-020/021 SPECIAL TOPICS IN ART: Painting/Drawing Art Studio Elective in Rome (3 credits)
Instructor: Luana Perilli
To work on life drawings in the open air is an exercise that strongly improves and increases the capacity to synthesize a large amount of visual information. Rome en plein air presents improvised situations that will help the students to approach painting with versatile perspective and to develop a strong self-confidence in it. During the program I will give also suggestions about movies related to the landscapes and students are asked to develop an individual project using every media such drawing, painting, photography, video, installation, sound or models to reconstruct their own perspective about an imaginary movie about Rome to come soon.
ART 3702 SPECIAL TOPICS IN ART: Intermediate / Advanced Drawing Studio (3 credits)
Instructor: Staff
Syllabus varies from semester to semester. The schedule includes outdoor sketching: on site, at museums, in master drawing, and print collections; as well as indoor studio practice such as sketching live models. Open to art and architecture students; open to liberal studies students with approval of instructor.
ART 3709 INDEPENDENT STUDIO IN ROME (4 credits/variable)
Allows students the opportunity to pursue special interests in fine arts not treated in regularly scheduled courses. The student plans a course of study or projects that meet the approval of the faculty member selected to guide his or her progress and evaluate the results. Permission of instructor required.
ARCH 4509 SPECIAL TOPICS IN VISUAL STUDIES: Photography (3 credits)
Instructor: Liana Miuccio
Rome is a visual feast for photographers. In this course, students will learn the art of photography while documenting the Eternal City's urban landscape. The technical component of the course consists of mastering camera operation, exposure, and digital input and output. Students will gain an understanding of the aesthetic possibilities of photography through weekly assignments, lectures on important photographers, photo field trips in Rome, and visits to contemporary photo exhibits. By the conclusion of the course, students will have produced a visual diary of their European experience.
Students can choose to work with traditional or digital photography. A camera with manual functions is required. Digital cameras must have a minimum of 4 megapixels. The required digital or analog camera may have automatic functions but also must have manual override options. Students will be required to photograph approximately two rolls of 36 exposure film or 72 digital images per week. The film or digital files must be accompanied by printed contact sheets and two prints per assignment. A minimum of 20 rolls, 20 proof sheets and 30 final prints are required for the final individual critiques. Students should expect to spend approximately $500 on processing and photographic paper during the semester. If students take advantage of the Cornell in Rome digital facilities to scan film, output proofs, and final prints, the student cost will be greatly reduced. Both technical and aesthetic excellence will be evaluated in the final grade. Does not fulfill prerequisite for upper-level Cornell photography classes.
Art History
ART 3702-022 SPECIAL TOPICS IN ART: The Roman Palimpsest (3 credits)
Instructor: Lila Yawn
Capital of empires for more than two millennia and continuously inhabited for well over three, Rome presents itself to the well-informed observer as a palimpsest in space, that is, as a 3D page written upon, cleaned of its writing (though never entirely), and re-inscribed in the visual and material idioms of later eras, often multiple times. This course investigates the history of Roman figurative art, architecture, and urban change from antiquity to the present through first-hand study of Rome’s most important historic palimpsests: buildings erected on top of earlier buildings; sculptures and paintings reworked to serve new figurative purposes; works appropriated and assigned new meanings; and art collections formed, installed, dismembered, and reassembled in response to changing tastes, representational needs, and economic conditions
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Rome from Constantine to Cavallini: Art, Architecture & Transformations of the City, 312-1300 (4 credits)
Instructor: Lila Yawn
Generally offered in the spring. This course examines the metamorphoses and continuities that characterize Roman artistic culture and its urban and architectural settings during the thousand-year "Age in the Middle" between pagan Roman antiquity and the early Renaissance. Class meetings take place on location in the city, permitting first-hand study of extant works in situ. These range chronologically from the grand Constantinian projects of the fourth century to the illusionistic experiments of Pietro Cavallini and Jacopo Torriti, which immediately preceded and inspired those of Giotto. Monumental painting, mosaic, architecture, and stone sculpture constitute major foci of the course, as do other arts high in the medieval hierarchy of media such as manuscript illumination, ivory and wood carving, metalwork, textiles and embroidery, and the multimedia events — liturgies, processions, coronations, pilgrimages — in whose service much medieval Roman art and architecture were created.
ART 3702 SPECIAL TOPICS IN ART HISTORY: Baroque Rome (4 credits)
Instructor: Paolo Alei
This course analyzes the masterpieces of Roman Baroque art and architecture from the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 18th century. In this period Rome was a leading center of the arts in Europe. Popes, cardinals, nobles, intellectuals, and church officials continued to sponsor the Renaissance project of renovatio urbis, the restoration and embellishment of the city. While analyzing urbanism, architecture, sculpture, and painting by some of the major artists of the period (Caravaggio, Bernini, Borromini, Cortona), the course considers the artistic trends that characterize the patterns of patronage in Counter-Reformation and Baroque Rome. Special attention will be given not only to the literary sources that shaped art theory, practice and criticism, but also to important issues such as propaganda, the viewer’s emotional engagement, and the artist’s social status. The unity of the visual arts, rhetorical effects, artistic rivalry, scenic urbanism, the relation between art and poetry, the use of classical and “bizarre” vocabulary, the concept of pastoral, the representation of ecstasy, and the idealization of death will be some of the themes explored in this course. Each art work, building or urban plan will be studied as a document to understand broader concepts related to politics, religion, music, science, theatre, and philosophy. Offered fall only.
ART 3102 MODERN ART IN ITALY: Contemporary Issues (3 credits)
Instructor: Shara Wasserman
This course is designed to introduce the student to the contemporary art scene in Rome. The class is a type of workshop of contemporary art, touching on all aspects of art work, from idea and creator to realization to exhibition to collection.
Class discussions focus on the artist, work of art, gallery, museum, and exhibition space. The class will consider the gallery as a cultural, didactic and commercial institution, and explore its relationship and responsibility to the artist and to the promotion of art, taking into consideration prices, values and art as investment. The class will define the function and role of the museum as an important facility in the preservation and display of art. The class focuses heavily on the means of viewing art and on exhibitions, and will consider the process of formulating an idea for an exhibition, on carrying out the selection, and on installation methods.
An important part of class discussion will be the process of selling and collecting, from private to corporate to commercial to institutional. The class will visit artists in their studios and in the gallery, and invite artists to speak in the classroom.
The course includes several lectures on Italian art, beginning with Futurism and its roots in the late 19th century and moving to about 1980. The intention is to make the student familiar with these movements and with the artists that had an international impact, and also to trace a lineage for the contemporary.
