SUMMER Courses 2009
Early Renaissance Art in 15th Century Florence
Professor Grazia Badino, Florence Faculty
3 credits
The course is an introduction to Renaissance Art in Florence: from Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Masaccio and Donatello to Michelangelo's youth in the age of Lorenzo il Magnifico and Republican Florence. The survey will span the entire 15th and early 16th centuries in the form of lectures at the Villa Corsi-Salviati and on-site visits, mainly to downtown Florence. Alternating the classroom sessions with visits to the major museums and monuments of Florence, students will have the opportunity to integrate their studies with first hand experience of the masterpieces of the Golden Age of Humanism. My aim is to give students different keys by which to approach a work of art in its complexity; these comprise history, iconography, technique, style and, of course, beauty. Florence is surely the best place to acquire a basic knowledge of Renaissance art and it also affords the opportunity of learning about coeval Italian Art in general. The program includes in effect an overnight trip to Rome that will enhance our insight into this epoch and it's culture.
Shakespeare's Italy
Professor Enoch Brater, Department of English Literature, University of Michigan
3 credits
This course is designed to explore the profound influence Italy and Italian sources have had on the shape of Shakespeare‘s dramatic accomplishment. In order to do so, the class will focus on five central concerns:
1. The ―reinvention‖ of Rome based on Shakespeare‘s re-reading of Plutarch and Seutonius in Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.
2. The direct borrowings from Italian romance writers, such as Cinthio, from whom Shakespeare derives several narratives, especially the one he develops in Othello. The ―return‖ to Italy of such a narrative in the hands of Verdi.
3. The incorporation of additional sites and sources in comedies, tragedies and romances such as Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado about Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Tempest.
4. The idea of the Italian ―renaissance‖ as embodied in Hamlet.
5. The development of a new lyrical language for drama and poetry (Shakespeare‘s sonnets) based on the ―dolce stile nuovo‖ of Dante and Petrarch.
Students in this course will be encouraged to visit the sites where these plays are said to have taken place (included on the program‘s trip to Rome) and consider as well other representations of the figures who appear in Shakespeare‘s writing (Brutus and Lucrezia, for example) as they have been imagined by other artists in the sculpture and painting of the period. The course will conclude with students performing scenes from the plays we have studied on the outdoor theater space on the villa lawn.
Keeping Accounts: The Fine Art of the Memoir in Florence
Professor Kristin Hass, Assistant Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan
3 credits.
Students will read a different memoir each week. These will include: the memoir of a fifteenth century peasant, Duccio Balestracci's The Renaissance in the Fields; the memoir of a merchant in Medici era, Mark Phillips' translation and annotation of the Memoir of Marco Parenti; the memoir of an early twentieth century childhood, Kinta Beevor's A Tuscan Childhood; the memoir of a family saved by the only African American combat soldiers in Europe at the end of WWII, Tullio Bertini's Trapped in Tuscany: Liberated by the Buffalo Soldiers; and of a twentieth century American art critic, Mary McCarthy's The Stones of Florence. Students will be asked to pull a history of the city from these memoirs and to see their own experience in Florence in the context of the history of the city from these memoirs and to see their own experience in Florence in the context of the history of meaning making in the city and of Americans in Florence. Writing for the course will include critical responses to the memoirs and students will be asked to produce a memoir of their own. Class time will include a good deal of reading and responding to each other's writing. The last week of classes will be dedicated to the intellectual work required to put the memoirs written over the course of the term into a final, thoughtful form.
Literature and Society
Professor Vincenzo Binetti, Department of Roman Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan
3 credits
This course will address issues of national identity, literature, and culture in modern and contemporary Italy through close readings of specific Italian novels in English translation; we will also look at the other forms of cultural production (such as films, visual media and articles from journals, magazines and newspapers) in order to further investigates and problematize various and often controversial representations of the Italian nation-state.
Italian Language (Elementary Level)
Professor Silvia Sammicheli, Florence Faculty
3 credits
Designed to provide a solid foundation in both spoken and written Italian, this intensive introduction permits comprehensive coverage of basic structures and vocabulary. Exclusive use of the language in dialogues and drills encourages development of linguistic awareness in a meaningful and dynamic context.
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