Gender, Race, and Fashion in Western Portraiture
Course Description
Summary
This course examines the visual representation and performance of race, gender, and fashionable dress from roughly 1504 to 1954. For elite early modern sitters, portraits were a valued means of constructing a public image, securing a spouse, memorializing the dead, and emphasizing political and dynastic relationships. Taking as our point of departure Renaissance and Baroque notions of likeness, otherness, and verisimilitude, we will investigate the problems of portrayal through various thematic subgenres as they alter and re-imagine themselves over the course of five centuries. Inasmuch as the idealized presentation of conventional, Petrarchan, i.e. white, feminine beauty is one of portraiture’s tacit tropes, we will ask how contemporary notions of gender and race—of sexual difference, physiognomy, performance, self-display, and skin-color, among other variables—inflect representation, identity, and artistic choice and reception. Independent research will culminate in a scholarly paper and short presentation.
Learning Outcomes
- academic research and writing, presentation skills, critical thinking
Prerequisites
Toward a Rigorous Art History and/or another 2000-4000-level art history or visual studies course or approval of instructor.
Please contact the faculty member : vanessalyon@bennington.edu