HONORS PROGRAM 2007
The 2007 Honors Program in Florence is a month-long session lasting from Tuesday, May 22 until Thursday, June 21, offering an interdisciplinary study of the history, material culture, and art of the Florentine Renaissance. The course seeks to build a broad and deep understanding of how commerce and industry created wealth and a taste for luxury goods, and how their relationship to and effects upon art production and patronage resulted in what we now call the Italian Renaissance,.
Specifically, we will study the rise of the merchant class in the early Italian Renaissance: the sources of its wealth, its values and its culture, its exercise of power, and the expenditure of its resources. We will examine the role of commerce in the development of Italian ceramics technology and aesthetics, and the development of “taste” that resulted from complex sets of influences and practices. We will trace the origins and transformations of artisanry and workshop, illuminating their contributions to what we now call the art of the Renaissance. We will ask how “art” came to be defined as such, and how the values of the merchant class were reflected in the art that they patronized and the artists who produced it.
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