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Course Description

Those who have held power throughout history have had created works of art designed to buttress or to proclaim their pre-eminent position for their contemporaries. Today’s museum-goers and tourists see many of these works—in museums or in situ—generally admiring them for their artistic quality but infrequently asking themselves or their guidebooks about the power dynamic that caused them to be created. Who commissioned the work? For what audience? For what purpose? What is the “message” being relayed? To what extent and by what means is the message relayed concretely or symbolically? Is it “art” or is it “propaganda”? Using a chronological and highly selective approach, these questions will be asked of a number of important works of painting, sculpture and architecture in the Western tradition from the time of the Egyptian pharaohs until the mid-20th century.
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