HA1070

UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

Summer Examinations: 2001/2002

METHODS IN ART HISTORY

Time allowed: 3 hours.

Candidates must answer THREE questions, ONE from SECTION A and TWO from SECTION B.

In SECTION B candidates must answer questions from two different modules; and in SECTION B they must not answer questions from a module for which they wrote an assessed essay.

Each question carries the same weight and candidates are advised to spread their time evenly between the questions.

Read carefully the instructions on the answer book and make sure that the particulars required are entered on each answer book.

SECTION A

1. Does the co-existence of multiple interpretations for particular works of

art undermine historians' claims to understand the art of the past?

2. Are the meanings that we draw from works of art and architecture determined solely by the methodological approach that we adopt?

3. "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at" (John Berger). Evaluate the concept of the male gaze for art historians.

4. How useful is the concept of artistic style?

5. How did Renaissance writers draw on classical ideas about artistic creativity?

SECTION B

Varieties of Interpretation

6. What are the methodological implications of art historians' contrasting

interpretations of the visual anomalies in Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère?

7. In what ways have issues of authorial intention been dealt with by historians exploring Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère?

Feminism and Art History

8. How might one interpret eighteenth-century sentimental portraits of motherhood from a feminist perspective?

9. How have feminist historians investigated the problems professional women artists had to negotiate in eighteenth-century England?

Semiology & Iconography

10. Is meaning in architecture best understood through the relationship between the form and the functions of the building and its elements?

11. Are semiotic and iconographic approaches to the meaning of the 'Arnolfini Portrait' irreconcilable?

Connoisseurship

12. Was "scientific connoisseurship" scientific?

13. Were the connoisseurs of the early twentieth century disinterested?

Psychoanalysis

14. Discuss Freud's account of Leonardo's Virgin and Child with St Anne.

15. Does our knowledge of Michelangelo's childhood shed any light on his depictions of parenthood?

End