Our Spring colloquium series explores how art forms like prints, architecture, music, and film intersects with the intellectual history explored in DS texts and lectures. Our first event of the semester focused on architecture, sculpture and other visual media in relation to early modern warfare in Europe. Numerous authors of the Renaissance, perhaps most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, wrote with conviction about the best ways to conquer territory, defeat enemies, achieve power, and maintain political control. Yet Renaissance writing in this vein rarely speaks to the messiness and lived realities of war. By contrast, the history of Renaissance art–from siege maps to toppled statues–reveals how often grand strategy failed in the face of popular insurgence and the sheer limitations of landscape and terrain.
Marisa Bass (History of Art Department, Yale) and Carolyn Yerkes (Department of Art & Architecture, Princeton) lead a discussion of their research into this history and why it still matters in the present.