Thank you for your interest in the Department of the History of Art at Yale. For over sixty years, our department has introduced thousands of undergraduates to works of art from diverse cultures around the world, trained hundreds of graduate students who have contributed significantly to our discipline, and worked closely with major museums on Yale's campus.

While art history at Yale is not characterized by any single methodological approach, our faculty shares a commitment to the firsthand investigation of works of art and to theoretically sophisticated multidisciplinary analysis. In any given year, the department has about twenty faculty, twenty to thirty undergraduate majors per class, and about fifty-five graduate students in residence.

The breadth of our faculty's interests, our variety of course offerings and special lecture events, the quality of the university's collections, and especially our vibrant community of undergraduate and graduate students make the History of Art a dynamic discipline at Yale. Welcome to our website and to our department.

David Joselit

Monday, October 6, 2008 6:00 PM
"IMPOSSIBLE!" FROM DISSENT TO DISENCHANTMENT IN THE GERMAN RENAISSANCE PRINT
Mitchell B. Merback, The Johns Hopkins University
Loria Building, 190 York Street, Room 351
In January 1525 three young Nuremberg painter-printmakers, Barthel and Sebald Beham and Georg Pencz, were put on trial for blasphemy and sedition. Expelled from the city as heretics, but later readmitted, the three artists, branded as "the three godless painters," crossed confessional boundaries in search of new patrons and new markets for their signature product, the Renaissance "little engraving." This lecture explores how, over the course of their careers, these three "dissident" artists forged a new intentional position, responding to the changing political circumstances and ethical commitments of Reformation culture after the debacle of the Great Peasants' War of 1525. All three artists embraced the dream of Christian liberty espoused by evangelicals, but later adopted a kind of disillusioned conservatism, opening the way to a new form of artistic freedom. Through novel interpretations of biblical, pagan, secular and allegorical subjects, the "Masters of the Little Engraving" (Kleinmeister) cultivated a new kind of subversive attitude, one that preferred ethics over theology; paradox over moralizing; game-playing over decorum; and cynicism over social satire. Their philosophy is captured in a work that will serve as a leitmotif for this lecture: Sebald Beham's emblem of Sisyphean labor, Impossible, which carries the inscription: "No one undertakes a greater thing than attempting the impossible."

Monday, October 6, 2008 3:30 PM
MEDIEVAL/RENAISSANCE FORUM
Prof. Evelyn Lincoln, Brown University
Beinecke Library, Seminar Room

Tuesday, October 7, 2008 6:00 PM
WORKS-IN-PROGRESS TALK
Architecture, Advertisement and the Quest for Visual Primacy in the Streets of Fin-de-siecle Paris
Bernard Zirnheld
Loria Building, 190 York Street, Room 351
The History of Art holds a monthly talk for an individual faculty member or student to present works in progress.