For students looking to get away from the dreary Baltimore winter, Intersession's Italian Renaissance Art and Culture course was the perfect chance to jet off to Europe for a whirlwind class that investigated the rich artistic and cultural treasures of Florence, Italy.
The course was headed by the Office of Study Abroad and took ten Hopkins students of varying class standings to the historic city to explore Italy's hub of Renaissance art. A three-credit class that spanned three weeks in January, from Jan. 7 to Jan. 27, Italian Renaissance Art and Culture (hereafter referred to simply as Renaissance Art) used Florence as a mooring point for forays into art history, whether such forays required a simple walk to the Uffizi Gallery down the street or a train ride south to Rome.
The class focused mainly on the rise and fall of the famed Medici family and how they changed the structure of power and took Florence from a Republic to a de facto oligarchy. Many of the most celebrated works of art (Donatello's David, various works by Giotto, Michelangelo, even Leonardo da Vinci) were commissioned by the powerful family, who rose from mercantile obscurity to become a widely-recognized tour de force.
Among the course requirements were readings on the works of art by leading art historians and theorists, two analytic papers, a lengthy blog post and a presentation on a work of art given in front of the class.
This was, of course, in addition to daily-three hour lectures at various locations around the city. Churches like the Duomo, Santa Croce and Santissima Annunziata were common classrooms as were state-funded art museums such as the Bargello, the Uffizi and the Opera del Duomo. The group also took a trip to Florence's rival city-state, Siena, to see firsthand the stylistic differences between the two cities.
One of the highlights was a tour of a relatively recent discovery beneath Siena's cathedral — a crypt richly decorated with frescoes that had been hidden by piled up rubble for centuries. The crypt was discovered in 2001 and raises questions about the use and function of the room.
Though the course leaned more heavily towards art than it did towards culture, students were encouraged to take weekend trips to other cities in Italy.
Among the popular destinations were Milan, Venice and Pisa, all easily accessible by public transportation. The chance to travel Italy outside of class time was a big draw for students, even before matriculating in the class.
Students also had the opportunity to enjoy sightseeing and culture in each of the cities they visited.
"Italy was an amazing cultural experience," senior Dona Trnovska said of the class. "It's not everyday you get to be on site and get to have class in a museum where you actually have the work of art in front of you as the professor is lecturing. We had to put the art in historical context and think about how its contemporaries would have interacted with the object."
Sophomore Dan Deutsch concurred wiht Trnovska's enthusiasm, saying, "Since it was my first trip to Europe, I was very happy that I was able to experience a different culture for the first time. My favorite part was traveling to six different cities during the trip."
Intersession's Renaissance Art is just one of many programs that the Office of Study Abroad offers over the January break.
Intersession academic trips give Hopkins students a chance to travel beyond the scope of the Baltimore's insular metropolitan area and to participate in an exchange of ideas in a global community.
