Humanities

NOTE: this checklist explains what needs to be done to complete the major. Please consult your degree audit about other requirements.

Venice and Dresden: Tales of Two Cities.

Course Description. Venice and Dresden—two cities that fascinate in part because of their respective association with slow decline and outright devastation—will provide us with a loose construction for considering social, artistic and intellectual developments that help define “the Modern.” A careful reading of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice will frame a discussion of middle-class liberation within the context of commercial adventurism and urban organization. We will examine transformations in painting, from the architectural precision of Canaletto and Bellotto (the latter a Venetian who served as court painter in Dresden for twenty years) to the Romanticism of C. D. Friedrich (who worked in Dresden) and J.W.M. Turner (famous for his atmospheric renderings of Venice). Musical connections will also be considered: Heinrich Schütz, a citizen of Dresden who wrote the first German opera, studied in Venice with Monteverdi; Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte (author of Don Giovanni), was Venetian. Of particular interest will be the commedia dell’arte, which developed in Venice in the mid-seventeenth century, and whose legacy within the arts was manifold. Giacomo Casanova’s mother was an actress in the commedia tradition and worked for much of her professional life in Dresden. Casanova’s famous autobiography will provide a window onto eighteenth-century society as well as a backdrop to Don Giovanni. Other literary works on our list include Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, both representative of Venice’s role as a site in the modern imagination. Finally, American painter Cy Twombly’s series Lepanto, which depicts the fiery sea-battle during which, in 1571, a combined Venetian, Spanish and Papal armada destroyed the fleet of the Ottoman Empire, will furnish an occasion for reflecting on East-West relations as well as the kind of destruction that befell Dresden when it was fire-bombed on February 13th, 1945.