Introduction: Arts, History and Social Change

 

Seminar questions

1. In what ways the analysis of the arts help us explain historical change in the early modern period?

 

2. Are artistic objects less reliable than written documents as source of information for historians?

 

3. “Historians and art historians belong to two entirely different traditions of intellectual enquiry”. Discuss

 

Suggested reading

Burke, Peter, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, London 2001 [e-book / D 16.255.B8]

 

Hauser, Arnold, The Social History of Art, 4 vols., London 1999, vol. 2 [N 72.H2]

 

Rabb, Theodore K. – Brown, Jonathan (eds), The Evidence of Art: Images and Meaning in History, special issue of Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1986); reprinted as Art and History: Images and their Meaning, Cambridge 1988 [N 72.H4]