VIS 120B. Roman Art (4 units)
Link to catalog page: https://catalog.ucsd.edu/courses/VIS.html#vis120b
Description
Roman art was the “modern art” of antiquity. Out of their Italic tradition and the great inheritance of Greek classic and Hellenistic art, the Romans forged a new language of form to meet the needs of a vast empire, a complex and tumultuous society, and a sophisticated, intellectually diverse culture. An unprecedented architecture of shaped space used new materials and revolutionary engineering techniques in boldly functional ways for purposes of psychological control and symbolic assertion. Sculpture in the round and in relief was pictorialized to gain spatial effects and immediacy of presence, and an extraordinary art of portraiture investigated the psychology while asserting the status claims of the individual. Extreme shifts of style, from the classicism of the age of Augustus to the expressionism of the third century AD, are characteristic of this period. The new modes of architecture, sculpture, and painting, whether in the service of the rhetoric of state power or of the individual quest for meaning, were passed on to the medieval and ultimately to the modern West. Recommended preparation: VIS 20. Prerequisites: none.
Prerequisite courses
VIS 120B has no prerequisite courses.
Successor courses
No courses have VIS 120B as a prerequisite.