Lorenzo Ghiberti as Artist and Writer (U01093)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 10 ? Acronym : ACE-4-HGhiberti

Lorenzo Ghiberti was the leading goldsmith and bronze sculptor in Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century. Many artists, both painters and sculptors, trained in his workshop. His principal surviving works are the 'Gates of Paradise' for the Baptistery which firmly established his posthumous reputation. He is also remembered for his writings which deal with the history and theory of art in ancient times and in the period leading up to his own day. He is one of the first to formulate the idea of progressive development in art, and also one of the first to attempt to explicitly relate the science of optics (then called 'perspective') to art. Most of all, however, he is significant in the history of art for what he tells us of his own work, so that we are uniquely placed to assess for the first time an artist's stated intention and his actual practice. This course will deal with both his sculpture and his writing. It is designed as a fourth-year course and some knowledge of the wider context of Florentine art at the time will be expected. A reading knowledge of Italian will be useful, though not essential. The course will consist of seminars in which papers will be given on various topics agreed at the outset between the course director and individual students. These will cover his sculpture itself and his writing both of which seem to place him in an equivocal position, either at the culmination of the medieval world or at the threshold of the modern. This bears on his standing in the years immediately following his death and in the subsequent centuries since then, which have tended to vacillate between the two. Recent and up-to-date views on this issue and on his work in general will be considered, but any assessment will be referred back to the work itself, to the factual information we have and to the primary historical sources.

Entry Requirements

? Pre-requisites : History of Art 2, or Architectural History 2A and 2B

Subject Areas

Home subject area

History of Art, (School of Arts, Culture and Environment, Schedule A)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : 4th year

? Delivery Period : Not being delivered

? Contact Teaching Time : 2 hour(s) per week for 11 weeks

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

The intended learning outcomes of this course are those expected of fourth-year study. That is, students are expected to develop knowledge and methods learnt in their earlier three years. By the end of the course, it is intended that, by looking closely at the work of one sculptor, they will have developed a critical eye to appreciate and an accurate language to describe both his free-standing and relief sculpture, and the confidence to assess its merits against that of his contemporaries. Students will also have learnt how to read and assess primary historical material, such as contemporary documentation and, in Ghiberti's case, his own writing. From his writing they will gain insight into fifteenth-century views on the development of art and also the relationship of art to scientific thinking at the time, especially in the field of 'perspective'. They will be expected to set his writing in the context of the written legacy of the period, particularly that of the Humanists. They should also have learnt to read recent scholarship in the light of this evidence and to judge it from an informed historical point of view. By following Ghiberti's subsequent 'fortuna critica', they will get a sense of the way the reputation of an artist can fluctuate over time. They will also learn to see such general art-historical terms as 'Gothic' and 'Renaissance' as retrospective historical constructs which tend to flatten out the complex relief map of actual history. In sum, the course is intended to provide a sound methodological basis for further research in art history.