Early Europe and Colonial Americas, 200–1750 CE

Religion, politics and daily life shaped art across this long period. You'll connect the Catacomb of Priscilla, Chartres Cathedral, Giotto's Arena Chapel, the Golden Haggadah and the Alhambra to the faiths they served, and Renaissance and Baroque works like the Birth of Venus, the Sistine Chapel, Las Meninas and Hunters in the Snow to their patrons and societies.

Art in this period traveled with trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Hagia Sophia inspired Sinan's Mosque of Selim II, the Great Mosque of Córdoba reused Roman and Visigothic columns, Donatello and Alberti revived ancient Roman models, Dürer brought Italian ideas about proportion to Germany, and the Angel with Arquebus, painted in the Andes, dresses an angel as a Spanish soldier.

This topic is about how things were made. You'll compare the mosaics at San Vitale, gold-and-garnet fibulae (cloak pins), the painted pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, a carved ivory pyxis and the embroidered Bayeux Tapestry with fresco in the School of Athens, oil paint in Titian and Caravaggio, Rembrandt's etching and a shell-inlaid folding screen from New Spain.

Ask who a work was made for and what it was meant to do. Icons and the Röttgen Pietà invited prayer, Sainte-Foy drew pilgrims, Leonardo painted the Last Supper for a monastery dining hall, Grünewald's altarpiece comforted patients at a hospital, Versailles and Rubens's Medici cycle glorified French royalty, and casta paintings and Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode pictured ideas about class and race.

Some works have no single agreed meaning. Scholars still debate whether the Arnolfini Portrait records a marriage or simply celebrates a wealthy couple, and the Codex Mendoza's frontispiece, painted by Indigenous artists with Spanish notes for colonial officials, shows the founding of Tenochtitlan in a way that can be read as both Aztec history and colonial record.