From Byzantine mosaics to Baroque masterpieces — 1,500 years of European art and its colonial encounter with the Americas. This unit spans more named artists than any other and demands mastery of style, period, and patronage.
From the Church commissioning Giotto's Arena Chapel to the Medici funding Botticelli's mythological paintings to the colonial government sponsoring casta paintings in New Spain, who paid for art in this period determines its content, style, and audience. Understanding the patron is essential to reading any work from Unit 3.
From Giotto's naturalistic space to Michelangelo's heroic figures to Raphael's School of Athens, Italian Renaissance artists self-consciously revived and reinvented the art of ancient Greece and Rome. This revival was not mere imitation — it was a creative transformation driven by humanism, the study of perspective, and new theories of beauty.
The European colonization of the Americas created new art forms that blended European, Indigenous, and African visual traditions. Casta paintings reveal the colonial obsession with racial classification. The biombo screen imports European lacquer techniques into Mexican context. Colonial art is never simply "European" — it is always a hybrid shaped by power, religion, and cultural encounter.