Ways of Seeing: Approaches to Art and Architectural History

HART 117 trains you to read art and architecture as evidence — not just to recognize famous works, but to ask what form, iconography, ritual setting, or political context tells you about the society that made them. You'll move chronologically from cave paintings through Gothic cathedrals, sampling cultures from the Ancient Near East to East Asia, while picking up interpretive lenses ranging from formal stylistic analysis to Marxist, feminist, and semiotic critique. Built around two textbook-anchored survey readings, a midterm, quizzes, and short reports, it functions as the visual-literacy foundation for later archaeology and art history coursework, where you're expected to already know how to look before you can argue.