Texts
Nethersole, Scott. Devotion by Design. Italian Altarpieces before 1500. London and New Haven: National Gallery/Yale University Press, 2011.
Pearce, Celia. “Narrative Environments. From Disneyland to World of Warcraft,” in Space Time Play. Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: the Next Level, edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, and Matthias Bottger, Basel, Boston, and Berlin: Birkhauser, 2007, 200-204.
Goals
Immediate–clarify use of blueprint at start of text; clarify writing by means of blocks not paragraphs; begin exploring nature of theoretical framing; clarify proper use of sources in paraphrase, citation, and direct quotation; initiate practice of signal phrases and other aspects of Chicago style in context of effective scholarly usage and academic integrity. Broad–develop skill in articulating conceptual links between the ideation of Nethersoles’s text and those of Celia Pearce, Temma Balducci and other scholars and theoreticians we are reading in the first part of the course.
Task
For this four-page writing assignment, select and discuss what appear to you to be the most important points Nethersole makes regarding the Botticini, Crivelli, and Gozzoli altarpieces of pp. 75-92 concerning the ways in which their image selection and arrangement passively reflect and actively project “social contracts” and collaborative decision-making. As we know from pp. 75-92 (and the preceding pp. 8-35) it was just these sorts of social and visual processes that drove such altarpieces’ commission and installation in the Renaissance. (I suggest devoting at least two pages to this question.)
Important: use several subheadings to clarify the section by section structure of your paper.
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