Courses

This aim of this seminar is two-fold. On the one hand, it explores how travels of people, objects, and knowledge have contributed to the mapping of art and architecture as well as the making of art and architectural history on a world-wide scale. On the other, it studies how art and architectural expertise (making of views, survey drawings and maps) have contributed to the physical and mental mapping of the world. The seminar approaches issues of mobility, translation, appropriation, forgery, cultural transmission, knowledge migrations, as well as of constructions of national identities. Together with a critical approach to secondary sources, the class will focus on literary and visual primary sources, from travel accounts to cartography. The semester starts in the fourteenth century and ends in the nineteenth century, and it addresses travels (true, fabricated, or deliberately imaginary) that span—listed in alphabetic order—the Americas, China, India, Japan, and the Mediterranean.