art_history
Art and Art History

Learning Tuscany: Art and Culture in Italy - Summer 2007

The Learning Tuscany program exposes deserving students to art and culture first-hand. Students are given the opportunity to be ambassadors from the United States and Texas, sharing their experiences with students and citizens of Italy. Many make connections that continue to exist today, and many have cited this experience as the most important of their academic careers. Our program is one of the foremost programs of its kind in the United States, and has launched international careers of our alumni. The program has trained students from all four of our divisions (Studio Art, Art History, Design, and Visual Art Studies) and students from other majors.

In Italian culture, life and art are inseparable. Countless examples illustrate this-the still-life quality of window displays in Florence, the artisanal care taken by a Sienese stoneworker replacing part of a medieval byway, the sculpted harmony of the Tuscan countryside. We cannot experience these essential qualities of Italian life in a classroom. Only with time and careful observation can we begin to absorb the richness and rhythm of life, and art, in Italy.

This summer program focuses on the cities and landscapes of Tuscany, to consider how we and past cultures define and represent particular places. Emphasis rests upon understanding the region in which the program is located. All students live in the historic facility of Santa Chiara in the town of Castiglion Fiorentino; they take an art history course and a drawing course taught by faculty from the UT Department of Art and Art History. These courses focus on architecture, experience and memory. Group discussions and visits to other cities, such as Florence, Siena and Rome, serve to frame student experiences within a broader view of Italy. The integrated approach of the program balances carefully designed trips with work in small groups in order to explore the forces that shaped Italian city and landscapes. Students learn local history, which at Castiglion Fiorentino reaches back to Etruscan times, and live and move among the buildings of past cultures.

Readings and assignments for the program emphasize how an understanding of a particular culture is shaped by visual experience. The practice of drawing focuses this experience; it is therefore is a critical part of the program. Yet making drawings in this context is less about artistic skill than about understanding what we bring to the viewing process; through this understanding, students learn new ways of seeing.

The itinerary, program costs, and course descriptions are available now. For further information, visit Learning Tuscany (or program code 353004 at CGEO: Center for Global Educational Opportunities). For more information on the program's content, itinerary, and program costs, download this document: Learning Tuscany Brochure (pdf) (download adobe reader)

Program Curriculum:

Summer 2007

ARH 374: Memory and Experience in Early Italian Architecture
Dr. Penelope Davies
Description: This course is a history of public architecture and city-planning from Etruscan to medieval times. Discussion will focus on two distinct but related issues: experience and memory. What was the effect of moving through these buildings? And how did the past, whether real or constructed, inform building and city-planning decisions? Throughout their early development, the towns and cities of Tuscany, and neighboring Umbria and Lazio, responded in different ways to their past. This consciousness of local history continues today; on the discovery of Etruscan remains beneath its medieval buildings, for instance, the town of Castiglion Fiorentino has recently come to terms with a new identity. Students will gain first-hand experience of living with early Italian architecture in Castiglion Fiorentino. Excursions to towns and cities further afield, such as Cortona, Rome and Siena, will introduce them to noted examples of Etruscan, Roman and medieval architecture, and show how the past lives on in the present.

ART 319T/ART 320K/ART 379T: Drawing Italian Architecture and the Tuscan Landscape
Prof. Bob Anderson
Description: This course is geared to all levels of experience from non-art majors to graduate students in art. While in the home base town of Castiglion Fiorentino we will be drawing its cityscape, local architecture and landscapes. On field trips with our art history faculty to various Tuscan sites and Rome we will be drawing the architecture being studied and observed as well as their surrounding landscapes. Travel journals and sketchbooks will be used and compositions will be further developed from them within the studios of Santa Chiara.

Program Faculty:

Prof. Bob Anderson, Senior Lecturer, Studio Art

Dr. Penelope Davies, Associate Professor, Art History

Dr. Ann Johns, Program Director, Lecturer, Art History

Dr. Janice Leoshko, Faculty Coordinator, Associate Professor, Art History.