ARTS634/ ARTS634W / SOCS634 / SOCS634WRomeLaurie Nussdorfer and Nicholas AdamsJune 27 - July 29, 2016
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Course Overview
“Rome is the most fascinating city on earth, and, as a historian, I have been lucky enough to devote the past four decades to studying, teaching and researching its past. I love teaching this course because it brings together all periods of Rome’s history and all aspects—from epic poetry to epic piazze and from Minerva to Mussolini. Rome is the most perfect interdisciplinary subject there is. I especially enjoy co-teaching with Professor Nicholas Adams, an architectural historian, because the forms, spaces and layers of Rome have had an astonishingly long impact on other cities and places.”
Laurie Nussdorfer
“This course is a special opportunity. Rome is the foundation. We can learn the buildings and their plans, but knowing the city thoroughly requires linking her forms to the history of her institutions. As an architectural historian, that is what makes this course unlike any other course I have taught. The monuments are eye-wateringly brilliant: the Pantheon, the great basilicas of early Christianity, the works of Borromini and Bernini. But to understand these works in in the context provided by a historian allows us to explore significant questions. How do the forms respond to historical circumstances? How do they condition further actions? How do later political leaders and architectural designers interpret them? Knowing Rome is to have the key to a thousand other places, small and great. Rome is the caput mundi.”
Nicholas Adams
- Full Course Description
The Eternal City has been transformed many times since its legendary founding by Romulus and Remus. This course will present an overview of the history of the city of Rome in antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque period, and modern times. Co-taught by an historian and an historian of architecture the class will examine the ways that site, architecture, urbanism, and politics have interacted to produce one of the world's densest urban fabrics. The course will include extensive study of Rome's major architectural and urban monuments over time (e.g., Pantheon, St. Peters, the Capitoline hill) as well as discussions of the dynamic forms of Roman power, religious and secular. In addition to visual evidence, we will make use of literary and historical texts, documents, and film.
The foundational option of this course (ARTS634W or SOCS634W) provides an additional level of guidance, support, and feedback. Students enrolling in the first term of study, as degree candidates or with the intention to apply for candidacy, are encouraged to take advantage of this option. Foundation courses focus sharply on the development of the necessary tools and skills required by graduate level research and writing. Students enrolled in the foundational course option will have additional writing assignments and will receive more extensive detailed feedback on their work from the instructor.
- Required Texts
Books available at Broad Street Books:
John Stambaugh, The Ancient Roman City
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. A. Mandelbaum
The Life of Cola di Rienzo, trans. John Wright
Susan Vandiver Nicassio, Imperial City: Rome under Napoleon
Borden Painter Jr., Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City
[Christopher Hibbert, Rome: The Biography of a City] recommended
Course Reading
These are designated “Course Reading” and can be downloaded from the Moodle site.
- Assignments, Course Organization and Evaluation
Assignments:
4-5 page paper on Virgil’s Aeneid, due on 30 June
4-5 page paper on The Life of Cola di Rienzo, due on 7 July
Two in-class visual analysis exercises
Weekly map exercises
Research presentation (July 26 & 28) and final research paper (8-10 pages plus bibliography) due on 11 August. (For this project students choose a Roman site or monument and, using visual and textual sources, research its history in three distinct periods of Rome’s past.)
- Course Schedule
Course Schedule
Week 1: Prehistory to the Pax Romana: From the Seven Hills to Emperor Hadrian
We get acquainted with the site of the city of Rome and explore the evolution of its government and architecture from prehistoric times (8th c. BCE) down through the Roman republic. We then explore the reshaping of the city by Augustus (27 BCE-14 CE), who laid the foundations of future imperial rule, and the reframing of Roman history by his poet Virgil, whose epic Aeneid gave Romans a cultural claim to rival the Greeks. We end with the zenith of the Roman empire, the “imperial peace,” under the emperor Hadrian (117-38).
Read:
Hibbert, Rome: The Biography of a City, chs. 1, 2 [recommended]
Stambaugh, The Ancient Roman City, chs. 1-5, 7, 13
Virgil, The Aeneid (trans. Mandelbaum), bks. 1, 8, 11, 12Course Reading:
Favro, “The Roman Forum and Roman Memory” (Moodle)Paper topic (answer based solely on evidence in Virgil’s poem):
What do gods and goddesses want from mortals? Does piety pay?Week 2: Late Antiquity to the Renaissance: From Emperor Constantine to Alberti
We begin with the first Christian emperor Constantine (312-37) and trace the remarkable transformation of the city under the impact of Christianity, charting the rise of the Bishop of Rome to hegemony over the western Catholic Church, the development of pilgrimage sites, and the creation of a papal monarchy with Rome at its head. We then examine the effects of the papacy’s departure from Rome in the 1300s and the local Roman attempt to restore the ancient republic led by Cola di Rienzo (1347-54). We conclude with the beginnings of the Renaissance, the revived interest in classical Rome exemplified by the poet Petrarch (1304-74) and the architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72).
Read:
Hibbert, Rome, chs. 3-7 [recommended]
Stambaugh, The Ancient Roman City, chs. 6, 12
The Life of Cola di Rienzo, trans. J. WrightCourse Reading (Moodle):
Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, excerpt
Petrarch, Familiar Letters, excerptPaper topic (answer based solely on the evidence of the anonymous fourteenth-century chronicle entitled The Life of Cola di Rienzo):
What specific Roman places, traditions, individuals, or texts from Rome's "double past" (classical and Christian) does Cola di Rienzo mobilize for his revolution?Week 3: High Renaissance and Baroque Rome: From Bramante to Bernini
The dream of returning to the grandeur of antiquity powered the Renaissance in Rome from 1450 to 1520, but the Protestant Reformation sparked a backlash and the remaking of Rome as a militant Catholic icon (1550-1600). Emerging from this process in the Baroque period (1600-1700) Rome became the model of a new kind of European city, the capital city, emulated throughout Europe (and eventually its colonies) not just as a religious symbol but also as a leader in architecture and the arts.
Read:
Hibbert, Rome, chs. 8-12 [recommended]Course Reading (Moodle):
Ackerman, “The Planning of Renaissance Rome”
Blondin, “Power Made Visible: Pope Sixtus IV as ‘Urbis Restaurator’”
Raphael and Castiglione, Letter to Leo X
Gregory Martin, Roma Sancta, excerpt
Krautheimer, Rome of Alexander VII, excerptWeek 4: 18th to 20th Century Rome: From the Grand Tour to Mussolini
Images of Rome in the graphic arts gave the city a significance and impact far beyond its walls. We will visit Olin Library Special Collections and the Davison Art Center to see some of the books and prints, especially by Piranesi (1720-78), which helped to make Rome a central artistic reference point. After looking at how Roman ideas (and ideas of Rome) influenced foreigners in the 1700s, we turn to the revolutionary changes in the city’s urban form first under Napoleon and later when it became the capital of united Italy in 1870. The week culminates with Benito Mussolini’s extraordinary attempts to renew the imperial glory of Rome. We will examine his dramatic transformation of the city in the 1930s and its influence on the face of the present-day city.
Read:
Hibbert, Rome, chs. 13-17 [recommended]
Nicassio, Imperial City: Rome Under Napoleon
Painter, Mussolini’s RomeCourse Reading (Moodle or JSTOR):
Goethe, Italian Journey, excerpt (Rome, 1786-87)
Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities, 255-62
Atkinson & Cosgrove, “City, Nation, & Empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome, 1870-1945” (JSTOR)
Kirk, “Framing St. Peter’s: Urban Planning in Fascist Rome” (JSTOR)Week 5: Post War and Contemporary Rome: From Fellini to Zaha Hadid
The last week of the course will bring us to the Rome of today, the capital of the Italian Republic (1947- ). We will look at some of the cultural developments (notably film) and major architectural monuments in which Rome has been setting and protagonist. Students will also make presentations and engage in class discussion of their research projects this week.
Course Reading (Moodle):
D. and L. Caldwell, Rome Continuing Encounters between Past and Present (selections) - Faculty Bios
Laurie Nussdorfer(B.A. Yale University; M. Sc. London School of Economics; Ph. D. Princeton University) is professor of history and letters. She has published numerous studies on the politics, urbanism, and culture of Baroque Rome, is completing the book Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome, and is the author of Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton University Press, 1992).
Nicholas Adams (B.A. Cornell University; M.A. New York University; Ph. D. New York University) is professor of art at Vassar College.