ITAL 8834 Beauty, Beasts, and Beginnings: Defining Art from Dante to the Renaissance

Conducted in Italian. This graduate seminar investigates how authors from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance answered one of the most enduring aesthetic questions: what is a work of art? Moving from the origins of Italian literary culture to the rediscovery and assimilation of Aristotles Poetics, the course traces the shifting intellectual frameworks through which art was both practiced and theorized. Through close readings of primary texts by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and early humanist interpreters of Aristotle, students will examine how conceptions of imitation, beauty, authorship, genre, and artistic agency evolved across centuries. Secondary scholarship will situate these developments within broader intellectual, cultural, political, and institutional transformations, including the rise of universities, the circulation of manuscripts, and the renewed prestige of classical antiquity.