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Class number:
3278
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Title: Renaissance Italy |
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Department: History |
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Career: Undergraduate |
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Component: Seminar |
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Session: Regular |
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Instructor's Permission Required: No |
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Grading Basis: Regular |
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Units: 1.00 |
| Enrollment limited to 15 |
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Current enrollment: 18 |
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Available seats: 0 |
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Start date: Tuesday, September 2, 2025 |
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End date: Wednesday, December 17, 2025 |
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Mode of Instruction: In Person |
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Schedule: TR: 10:50AM-12:05PM, MC - 305 |
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Instructor(s): Cocco, Sean |
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Prerequisite(s): None |
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Distribution Requirement: Meets Humanities Requirement |
Course Description:
This course explores the origin, distinctiveness, and importance of the Italian Renaissance. It is also about culture, society, and identity in the many “Italies” that existed before the modern period. Art, humanism, and the link between cultural patronage and political power will be a focus, as will the lives of 15th- and 16th-century women and men. Early lectures will trace the evolution of the Italian city-states, outlining the social and political conditions that fostered the cultural flowering of the 1400s and 1500s. We will consider Florence in the quattrocento, and subsequently shift to Rome in the High Renaissance. Later topics will include the papacy’s return to the Eternal City, the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, and the ambitions of the warlike and mercurial Pope Julius II. Italy was a politically fragmented peninsula characterized by cultural, linguistic, and regional differences. For this reason, other topics will include: the fortunes of Venice, the courts of lesser city-states like Mantua and Ferrara, the life of Alessandra Strozzi, and the exploits of the “lover and fighter” Benvenuto Cellini. We will also look at representations of the Renaissance in film.
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