Ancient and Medieval Aesthetics (20129)

Degree/study: Degree in Humanities
Year: 3rd-4th
Term:1st
Number of ECTS credits: 5 credits
Hours of studi dedication: 125 hours
Teaching language or languages: spanish
Teaching Staff: Tamara Djermanovic

1. Presentation of the subject

From the origins to modernity. This course deals with Greece and modernity. A genesis of the art and beauty issues in Western culture. The perspective of Classic Antiquity. The great paradigms. Aesthetic modernity: essential theories 

2. Competences to be attained

General competences	Specific competences
An approach to the reflection on art and creativity in the West, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.	Students shall acquire some fundamental ideas on the thought and the work of the proposed authors, and will be able to express them.

3. Contents

Unit 1. Genealogy and history of the aesthetic issues. Ancient and modern view.
Unit 2. Pre-platonic aesthetics: Pythagoreanism. Beauty as harmony and proportion.
Unit 3. The foundations of the aesthetical issues: Plato and Aristotle. Plato. Metaphysics of the beautiful. The beautiful and Beauty. Mimesis. Arts criticism. Aristotle. Art as knowledge. Artistic construction. Poetics and Canon.
Unit 4. Medieval Aesthetics. Beauty as light. Ethics over Aesthetics. Neoplatonism. Symbolism and allegorism.
Unit 5. Towards Renaissance modernity. Dante.
Unit 6. The East aesthetical traditions. Byzantium, Russia. Icons. Art as knowledge.
Unit 7. Renaissance as the first aesthetic culture in the West. Art as a representation. New man and new Imago mundi. Self-consciousness. Anthropocentrism. Individualism. Creative freedom. Painting, Literature, theoretical reflection. Michelangelo. Leonardo da Vinci.
Unit 8. Humanisms. First Humanism: Petrarch. Classical Humanism: from the Florentine Humanism to Erasmus. Late Humanism: Rabelais, Cervantes. Montaigne, Shakespeare.

*The full version with the sections 4. Assessment, 5. Bibliography and teaching resources, 6. Methodology, and 7. Planning of activities is available in the original version.

4. Assessment

5. Bibliography and teaching resources

5.1. Basic bibliography

5.2. Complementary bibliography

5.3. Teaching resources

6. Metodology

7. Planning of activities