Course Overview
Students are introduced to key visual images, sculptures, and buildings in the Western cultural tradition: their features, materials, interrelationships, and social, religious, economic, and political contexts. After brief grounding in the visual culture of the ancient world and Middle Ages, the course focuses on painting, architecture / built environment, sculpture, photography and other products of visual culture in Europe and the Americas from the 1400s CE to the present. The Renaissance, Mannerism, the Baroque, Neoclassicism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Modernism and Post-Modernism are addressed. Influences on Western art from China, Japan, India, and Africa are also briefly considered. Through studying how visual culture has been defined, classified, ranked, and analyzed in Western culture – an approach established in Renaissance Europe – course participants will be equipped to contextualize the built environment, and past and curr
- Not offered this term
- This course is not offered this term. Notify me to receive email notifications when the course opens for registration next term.
Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Define and use standard terminology central to the study of visual culture (images, objects, buildings), including chronological and stylistic features.
- Demonstrate awareness of continuity and change in the history of visual culture, by discussing changes in subjects, themes, styles and materials in painting, sculpture, architecture, photography and other products of visual culture.
- Analyze selected works of artists and architects in specific periods in Western art.
- Identify major cultural, scientific and technological changes that significantly affected visual culture.
- Discuss the roles of artists, architects, patrons, and other leaders in developing, enforcing and critiquing artistic norms.
Effective as of Fall 2022
Programs and courses are subject to change without notice. Find out more about BCIT course cancellations.