2020-21 Academic Catalog

Three remarkable royal women (Queen Isabel of Castile, Anne of France, and Archduchess Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands), linked by blood, marriage, and shifting dynastic alliances, provide a lens to examine patronage networks and collecting culture in France, Spain and the Netherlands circa 1500, at the transition from the late middle ages to the Renaissance. Isabel of Castile was exceptional as a sovereign queen; for most royal women power was indirect, delegated, and carefully masked, while the requirement to produce an heir was paramount. The course will consider the interplay of these constraints and the works of art these princesses commissioned and lived with by looking at topics like palace design, inventories of royal collections and the hierarchies of luxury arts they reveal, portraiture as an expression of dynastic piety and marriage politics, and the new prominence of painting as an independent and collectable medium. Prerequisite: Any one art history course