Caravaggio, Vermeer, and the Life of Paintings

Focusing on great paintings by seventeenth-century European painters--Caravaggio's Medusa, Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring, Rembrandt's Self-Portraits, and many others--this seminar will consider how and why artists these artists strove to overcome the boundary between representation and the real and make the world "present" to the viewer. Reading authors such as George Steiner and Jacques Derrida, we will develop a definition of the word "presence" and consider the various critiques of it.NOTE: This seminar is for undergraduates only.