During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the term ‘art’ covered a field far broader than the ‘fine arts’ or ‘visual arts’ do in modern usage.  The Latin word ‘ars’, like the Greek word ‘techne’, referred essentially to ‘skill’ or ‘craft’ and more generally to bodies of practical techniques and technologies adjoining but distinct from theoretical knowledge. The Renaissance ‘artist’, understood in broad contemporary terms, therefore occupied a central place in the cultural landscape in which the manual or ‘mechanical’ arts (typically the domain of the ‘artisan’) met the liberal arts and shaded off into the natural sciences.

This Option offers students an opportunity to explore this unfamiliar landscape, with a particular focus on the many ways in which the ‘arts’ developed new means of understanding and intervening in the world of nature.  This is a world in which artists rose from the company of artisans and craftsmen on the strength of new techniques for imitating nature, where artist-engineers invented machines and perfected the arts of war, where astronomers joined forces with sailors to improve the art of navigation, where mathematical practitioners of great variety devised instruments which triggered major intellectual breakthroughs, where new species flooding in from the new world raised hopes of perfecting the art of medicine, where alchemists and natural magicians sought new arts to manipulate the deepest hidden forces of nature, and where iconic figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Paracelsus rub shoulders with nameless tradesmen.

In addition to representative contemporary texts from across Europe, students will be exposed to a rich variety of visual sources, from classic works by major Renaissance artists to maps, charts, instruments, machines, and the wonderful natural and artificial objects avidly collected by princes and patricians in this period.

No technical or special linguistic background will be assumed.