3.0

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Since the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550), in which the history of art was first conceived as the successive accomplishment of a select group of great men, the discipline of Art History has had a gender problem. Today, feminist scholars continue to grapple with this troubled legacy, working to redress the masculinist biases inherent in disciplinary methods and assumptions while at the same time fighting to recover the value of traditionally overlooked subjects and genres. In the early 1990s, the history of masculinity emerged as an adjunct to traditional feminist history. Aimed at addressing misconceptions about the nature and naturalness of male identity, this subfield has helped open masculinity to critical reevaluation. Drawing on the contributions of contemporary feminist scholarship as well as those of the history of masculinity, this course explores the ways in which a reconsideration of the nature of male identity in the historical past might help us rethink key art historical issues, for example, paradigmatic notions of the Renaissance artist, the nature of copying and competition, and the concepts of creativity, invention, and genius. The course will focus on developments in the German speaking world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries; as numerous historians have noted, the German speaking lands underwent a crisis of masculinity during this period, in part precipitated by the events of the Protestant Reformation. At the same time, the region witnessed profound changes in the status of the arts and of the artist. In this course, we will explore the ways in which these phenomena were related, and how they contributed to culturally specific notions of the relationship between masculinity and artistry. We will also consider the ways in which a close examination of masculinity in the German Renaissance opens up new avenues of art historical and cultural historical investigation with relevance beyond the period itself.