No 6270
Wednesday 13 June 2012
Vol cxlii No 35
pp. 698–723
Further to their recent Notice (Reporter, 2011–12, p. 599), the Faculty Board of Human, Social, and Political Science give notice of an amendment to the list of papers offered in the academical year 2012–13. Some Part I papers were erroneously included in the list of variable subjects listed under the subject of Archaeology.
Part I papers for the Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos are not variable. Thus all Part I papers (1, 2, 3, 4A, 4B, 4C, 4D, 5, 6, and 7) will be offered as detailed within the Regulations for the Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos, Regulation 12 (Statutes and Ordinances, p. 257).
The Faculty Board of Architecture and History of Art give notice of the special subjects for the History of Art Tripos, 2012–13. The Board shall have the power of subsequently issuing amendments if they have due reason for doing so, and if they are satisfied that no student’s preparation for the examination is adversely affected (Statutes and Ordinances, p. 333, Reg. 11(b)).
The period of transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages has traditionally been labelled as ‘the Dark Ages’. Far from a gloomy picture of decline, more recent studies have stressed how we can actually perceive dynamic transformations and innovations of great relevance to today’s changing times. This Special Subject explores as a case-study the reception of the Roman heritage in Anglo-Saxon England with the momentous changes that the advent of a new religion and social values brought with them. This artistic period will be studied in a wide context, and consider contacts with immediate neighbours in the Insular world (the Irish and the Picts – and the ‘local’ Romano-British), those on the Continent, and with the Mediterranean and Islamic world. Questions of continuity and change, patronage and experiment, the relationship between a text-based religion and images, travel and the migration of ideas and sources, will be investigated using a wealth of material: manuscripts, sculpture, metalwork, and architecture as well as the coinage of the time.
This Special Subject explores the art and architecture of the Italian city in a period of urban expansion, governmental and religious change, and growing civic and artistic self-awareness. The course concentrates on central and northern Italy, examining Rome and the Papal States alongside the city communes to the north, and asking how indigenous traditions and differing political circumstances interacted with shared urban characteristics and the movement of artists between cities. Tracing developments in architecture, sculpture, mosaic, fresco, and panel painting, it examines workshop practices and the issue of individual artistic identity, with reference to contemporary documents and to historiography from Vasari onwards. The course considers how artists and architects drew on the classical and early Christian heritage of the cities concerned, but were also informed by Byzantine art and by the development of the Gothic style in northern Europe. Paying attention to the cityscape as a whole, the course addresses ways in which art and architecture served to depict the city and to articulate civic religion, private and communal interests, relationships between city and countryside, and references to the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem.
The reigns of Elizabeth I and James I saw an unprecedented flourishing of the visual arts in England. In this era of political and religious instability, English artists and patrons experimented with new forms and motifs, forging a unique and idiosyncratic style. Yet this was an art full of contradictions: it revelled in a revived medieval chivalry while grappling enthusiastically with classicism, celebrated grandeur in the country house and royal portrait while embracing the intimacy of the portrait miniature. This Special Subject will examine the tensions and pluralism of English art ca. 1550–1625, paying close attention to the social and cultural contexts that framed and shaped it. We will study panel painting and limning, architecture, sculpture, printmaking, the luxury arts, and the court masque alongside the period developments in literature and theatre with which they were imbricated. The complexities and significance of gender (particularly under Elizabeth), religious confession, and courtly self-fashioning for the arts will be addressed. Throughout, English art’s relationship to continental models – at the time and in subsequent historiography – will be critically assessed, as will its connection to the idea of Renaissance.
A study of Dürer as a painter, an engraver, a draughtsman, and a theorist demonstrates his prevailing place in the Northern Renaissance. His travels are studied and the impact of new ideas and forms on the development of his art. This involves a comparative analysis of Italian and Northern trends. However, the principal aim is to show the place of Dürer’s production within his social and cultural environment (humanist, popular, religious, etc.). This approach should allow an understanding not only of the artistic but also of the cultural aspects of Dürer’s art.
GianLorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) were almost exact contemporaries, yet they came from very different backgrounds. Bernini, born in Naples, was the son of a Florentine sculptor, whereas Borromini was a stonemason from Lugano. This course is set in the context of the papacies of Urban VIII, Innocent X, and Alexander VII, all of whom were ambitious patrons of the arts, promoting both family identity and the glorification of the Catholic Church. Bernini was a precocious and brilliant sculptor who soon turned to architecture, while Borromini was an intensely professional and individual architect. During their long careers, Bernini and Borromini, together with gifted contemporaries such as Pietro da Cortona, helped to shape the face of Baroque Rome. The works to be studied span many media, and will include urban planning, churches, chapels, tombs, monuments, fountains, gardens, family palaces, and portraits.
This course will cover the history of the Surrealist movement from its birth in Paris in 1924 to the dissolution of ‘historical Surrealism’ in 1969. It will focus on the developments of Surrealism during this fascinating period of French history and explore its revolutionary role in art, literature, and politics in France in the inter- and post-war years: from its birth in the aftermath of World War I, to its engagement with Marxism and psychoanalysis in the 1930s, to its exile in New York during World War II, to its post-war international exhibitions. Students will be encouraged to examine Surrealist art from a number of thematic perspectives – including desire, mythology, occultism, and utopianism, and to generally consider the relationship between Surrealist art and politics (gender, racial, and national) so that its successes and failures, and its legacy today, can be critically assessed.
From the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725), artistic practice in Russia underwent a period of remarkably accelerated development, complementing the long-standing tradition of icon painting with a wealth of experimentation in secular art. At the same time, the country acquired art collections of international repute, thanks to the activities of patrons as ambitious as Catherine the Great. This course examines the vibrant visual culture which resulted, from the imposing portraits of the eighteenth-century court, to the iconoclastic antics of the pre-Revolutionary avant-garde. By focusing both on painters unfamiliar in the West and on works as canonical as Malevich’s Black Square, the course will challenge standard interpretations of the modernist mainstream, and consider the role which Russia played in the wider development of Western European art.
Although his working career hardly extended more than twenty years, Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) was one of the most productive and influential of all Renaissance artists and perhaps the one whose art developed most radically and rapidly. He was an artist capable of absorbing and setting to his own purposes the innovations of his major contemporaries and he never remained static. From his early career in the Marches and Umbria, though a sojourn in Florence, to his final period in Rome, where he was responsible for the world-famous frescoes in the Stanze (including the School of Athens, the Expulsion of Heliodorus, and the Fire in the Borgo), he revitalised all the genres and traditions that he touched. A painter on panel, canvas, and fresco, he also made innovatory designs for tapestries, and became an important architect and archaeologist. He was a prolific and exceptionally versatile draughtsman and, indeed, his drawings have been prized even at periods when his painting has sunk in popularity. All the phases of his work had an incalculable effect on later Western European art and in all genres: representations of the New and Old Testaments, Madonnas and Holy Families, Altarpieces, Portraiture, Ideal Assemblages, Historical scenes, Mythologies; none would have developed as they did without his example.
While this course will cover the whole of Raphael’s career, it will place more stress than usual on his Roman period, which lasted over a decade and which was the most important for later 16th and 17th century art. It will not be possible to do more than glance at Raphael’s architecture, but some attention will be given to his studio organization, the communication of his visual ideas in engravings and woodcuts, and the work of his most immediate assistants, associates, and followers such as Giovanni Francesco Penni, Giulio Romano, Perino dela Vaga, and Polidoro da Caravaggio.
Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian (c. 1488–1576) was the dominant Venetian painter of the 16th century and has remained one of the most universally admired of Western artists. Famed above all as an incomparable colourist, Titian was a remarkably adventurous and varied artist who essayed all the genres currently practiced and left his mark upon them all. His career has few parallels in longevity and productiveness and he has been very much studied. However many major problems remain to be resolved: of attribution, of dating, and of meaning.
This course will aim to provide a coherent account of Titian’s artistic production, with particular attention paid to the different phases of his art, its variety, and the painter’s constant experimentation. The focus will be on issues of style, development, dating, and meaning, and the approach will be primarily visual. Some attention will be paid to Titian’s relations with other painters such as Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Tintoretto and with his most significant patrons, but his art will stand centre-stage.
This course examines the major developments in the theory and practice of art from the late 1940s until the end of the 1990s, paying particular attention to the art of the 1960s and its legacy. The explosion of 1960s artistic innovations overturned formalist modernism and initiated debates about postmodernism which remain contested. While the emphasis of the course reflects the importance of American contributions to the development of postwar art, it also treats important British, Western European, and Latin American practices. Particular emphasis is placed on the challenge to painting and sculpture mounted by the Neo-Avant-Garde and, most comprehensively, by Conceptual art. The collapse of medium-specific conventions continues to present a challenge for the definition of art up to the present day.
The Faculty Board of Philosophy have prescribed the following texts and subjects for the Philosophy Tripos, 2013:
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Paper 4. |
Set texts |
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Plato, Meno |
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Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion |
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J. S. Mill, On Liberty and The Subjection of Women |
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Paper 5. |
Modern and medieval philosophy |
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Abelard, Collationes |
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Ibn Tufayl, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan |
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Descartes, Meditations on first philosophy |
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Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and The Monadology |
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Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding |
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Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous |
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Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I and Appendix |
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Paper 1. |
Metaphysics |
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Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus |
Candidates also taking Paper 9 may not answer questions in this paper on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which will be marked with an asterisk (*). The paper will be set in such a way that there are at least ten questions not marked with an asterisk.
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Paper 2. |
Philosophy of mind |
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Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations |
Candidates also taking Paper 9 may not answer questions in this paper on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which will be marked with an asterisk (*). The paper will be set in such a way that there are at least ten questions not marked with an asterisk.
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Paper 3. |
Ethics |
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Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, with special reference to the following topics: the categorical imperative; duty and motive; morality and freedom |
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Paper 4. |
European philosophy from Kant |
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Kant, Critique of Pure Reason to the end of the Transcendental Dialectic (A704, B732) |
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Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction, Consciousness, Self-consciousness (paragraphs 73–230); Hegel’s Logic: being part of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, paragraphs 1–111; Introduction to Lectures on the Philosophy of History, as far as (but not including) The Geographical Basis of World History |
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Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil |
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Paper 9. |
Special subject specified by the Faculty Board |
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In 2013: Wittgenstein |
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Tractatus |
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Philosophical Investigations |
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On Certainty |
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Study of the following topics is also included: the development throughout Wittgenstein’s work of his views on solipsism and the self, and the nature of philosophy. |
Candidates taking this paper are barred from answering asterisked (*) questions in Paper 1, Metaphysics and in Paper 2, Philosophy of mind.
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Paper 11. |
Aesthetics |
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Plato, Ion, Symposium, and Republic (Books II, III, X) |
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Hume, ‘On the Standard of Taste’ in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary |
The Faculty Board of Human, Social, and Political Science give notice of an amendment to the papers offered in Parts IIa and IIb of the Politics, Psychology, and Sociology Tripos in 2012–13, announced in their Notices of 19 May 2011 (Reporter, 2010–11, p. 759) and 10 May 2012 (Reporter, 2011–12, p. 600).
Paper Int. 10 will now be offered and will be offered as ‘Int 10. An interdisciplinary subject V: Anthropology of cities and space’.