Course Description
ARH3350 is the Baroque art history survey. The Statewide Course Numbering System titles it Baroque Art and sets out an unusually specific scope: "1. Baroque art and architecture in France. 2. The influence of the French Baroque on the remainder of Europe. 3. Baroque art in Italy and Spain. 4. Rococo art and architecture in Northern and Southern Europe. 5. The influence of Spanish Baroque architecture on the architecture of Latin America." There is no statewide prerequisite.
⚠ The fifth item is worth noticing. A survey that explicitly includes the transmission of Spanish Baroque architecture to Latin America is broader than the European-canon course this subject was traditionally taught as — and in Florida that is not an academic nicety. The oldest European-derived architecture in the United States is in St. Augustine, and Spanish colonial building in the Americas is part of this state's own fabric.
Three Florida public universities carry it, ⚠ and one carries it at four credits:
| Institution | Its title | Credits |
|---|
| Florida International University | Baroque Art | 4 |
| University of North Florida | Baroque Art | 3 |
| University of West Florida | Baroque Art and Architecture | 3 |
The period itself runs roughly from 1600 to 1750 and is defined less by a style than by an argument. Baroque art was made for institutions that wanted to persuade — the Counter-Reformation church, absolutist monarchy, mercantile republics — and its characteristic devices (dramatic light, diagonal movement, the viewer drawn into the scene) are instruments of persuasion. ⚠ Understanding why Caravaggio's lighting exists is more of this course than learning to recognise it.
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- Identify major works of Baroque and Rococo art and architecture by artist, approximate date and region.
- Analyse a work formally — composition, light, colour, space, handling — using the vocabulary of the discipline.
- Explain the historical conditions that produced Baroque art: the Counter-Reformation, absolutism, the rise of the art market in the Dutch Republic, and colonial expansion.
- Distinguish regional developments — Italian, Spanish, French, Flemish, Dutch, and the Latin American colonial — and explain what makes each distinct.
- Analyse the work of the principal figures: Caravaggio, Bernini, Borromini, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Vermeer, Poussin and their contemporaries.
- Explain the role of patronage — papal, royal, civic, ecclesiastical and, in the Dutch Republic, a market of private buyers — and how it shaped what was made.
- Analyse Baroque architecture and urbanism: the church façade, the palace, the square, and the manipulation of space and approach.
- Explain the transmission of Spanish Baroque architecture to the Americas and how it changed in the process.
- Distinguish Rococo from Baroque and explain the social change the shift reflects.
- Apply iconographic analysis — reading subject matter, symbol and programme.
- Write a sustained visual and historical analysis of a work, supported by evidence and correctly cited.
- Use scholarly sources critically and distinguish them from popular writing.
Optional Outcomes
- Examine women artists of the period — Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Elisabetta Sirani — and the conditions that constrained and enabled them.
- Examine the material and technical side: workshop practice, pigments, canvas and panel, printmaking.
- Examine the global dimension — trade, the Jesuit missions, and exchange with Asia.
- Address collecting, provenance, attribution and the art market.
- Conduct object-based study in a museum collection.
- Address conservation and restoration controversies.
- Undertake original research on a single work or problem.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- Defining the Baroque — the term's history, its contested boundaries, and what the period shares beyond a date range.
- Italy — Caravaggio and naturalism; the Carracci and classicism; Bernini and Borromini; ceiling painting and illusionism.
- Spain — Velázquez, Zurbarán, Murillo; the court and the church; the Golden Age.
- Flanders — Rubens, Van Dyck, the workshop as an enterprise.
- The Dutch Republic — Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals; genre, landscape, still life and portraiture; ⚠ an open market rather than a patron, and what that changed.
- France — Poussin and Claude; Versailles; the Academy and the codification of taste.
- Architecture and urbanism — façades, plans, the sequence of approach, and the city as a designed experience.
- Latin America — the transmission of Spanish Baroque, and its transformation by local materials, craftsmen and traditions.
- Rococo — Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Tiepolo; the shift from public persuasion to private pleasure.
- Method — formal analysis, iconography, social history of art; writing about images.
Optional Topics
- Women artists and the conditions of their practice.
- Materials, technique and workshop organisation.
- Global exchange and the Jesuit missions.
- Collecting, attribution and the market.
- Museum and object-based study.
- Conservation controversies.
- Baroque music and theatre as context.
Resources & Tools
- Baroque and Rococo Art and Architecture by Ann Sutherland Harris is the standard text for this course.
- Italian Baroque Art (Klein and Zerner) and the Pelican History of Art volumes — Wittkower on Italy, Blunt on France — are the scholarly references.
- Svetlana Alpers's The Art of Describing is commonly assigned for the Dutch material and is a good introduction to how art historians argue.
- ⚠ Free image resources are excellent in this period: the Metropolitan Museum and Rijksmuseum both publish open-access high-resolution images, the Prado and National Gallery have deep online collections, and Google Arts & Culture offers gigapixel images in which brushwork is visible. Looking closely is the discipline, and it has never been easier to do from a desk.
- JSTOR and the Art Index through your library for scholarship; ⚠ the Chicago Manual of Style is the citation standard in art history and is expected.
- ⚠ Florida collections worth visiting: the Ringling Museum in Sarasota holds one of the most significant Baroque collections in the United States, including the Rubens cartoons — an extraordinary resource for this specific course. Add the Norton in West Palm Beach, the Harn in Gainesville, and the Spanish colonial architecture of St. Augustine.
Career Pathways
- Curator (SOC 25-4012), Museum Technician and Conservator (SOC 25-4013), and Archivist (SOC 25-4011) — ⚠ all normally requiring graduate study, which should be said plainly.
- Postsecondary Teacher, Art History (SOC 25-1121) — requiring a doctorate.
- Art Appraiser and auction-house roles.
- Secondary Art Teacher (SOC 25-2031) with a teaching qualification.
- ⚠ The honest framing: most students in this course are not becoming art historians. What it develops — close visual analysis, argument from evidence, and sustained writing — transfers to law, publishing, marketing, museum education, arts administration and the tourism and cultural sector. Florida's museums, historic sites and cultural institutions employ across all of those.
- Florida context: the Ringling, Norton, Harn, Tampa Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami and the St. Augustine historic sites; and the Art Basel Miami Beach ecosystem, which supports a substantial commercial art sector in South Florida.
Special Information
Offering Notes — offerings and hours, school by school
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|
| Florida International University | Baroque Art | 4 | not published |
| University of North Florida | Baroque Art | 3 | not published |
| University of West Florida | Baroque Art and Architecture | 3 | not published |
All three are State University System institutions, so statewide numbering guarantees transfer between them.
⚠⚠ Florida International carries this at four credits where the other two carry three. The transfer guarantee moves the credit you earned; it does not convert three into four. A student moving from UNF or UWF into a programme that budgets four may be a credit short against the requirement; moving the other way, the extra credit may apply as an elective or nowhere. ⚠ Art history majors frequently have tightly specified distribution requirements by period, which is where this surfaces. Confirm with the receiving department before the term you need it.
⚠ The 45 contact hours at the top of this guide are derived for the three-credit version — the Florida convention for a 3-credit lecture course. No institution publishes an hour figure; the four-credit version will run higher.
⚠ "Baroque Art" or "Baroque Art and Architecture"
Two institutions use the statewide title; the University of West Florida adds "and Architecture" explicitly. ⚠ The statewide description includes architecture in three of its five numbered items, so architecture belongs in the course regardless of the title — UWF's is simply more accurate about it.
Where the difference shows is emphasis. A course weighted toward painting will treat Bernini and Borromini briefly; one that takes architecture seriously will spend weeks on plans, façades and the experience of moving through a building. ⚠ If you are heading toward architectural history or historic preservation, ask which you are getting — and in Florida, where Spanish colonial building is a live preservation concern, that is a practical question rather than an academic one.
Position in the curriculum
An upper-division survey with no statewide prerequisite, though most programmes expect the introductory two-semester art history sequence (ARH2050 and ARH2051) first — ⚠ and the neighbouring number ARH3728 requires it explicitly, which suggests departments assume it here too. It normally satisfies a period distribution requirement in an art history major and is available as an elective to others.
Workload
Budget six to nine hours a week for the three-credit version. ⚠ The workload is reading, looking and writing — and the looking is the part students under-invest in. Examinations in this discipline typically require identifying works and analysing them under time pressure, which rewards repeated exposure rather than last-minute reading. Look at the images daily in short sessions from the first week; it works far better than concentrated revision.
AI Integration
Art history is a field where these tools are genuinely helpful for orientation and dangerously unreliable for specifics — and where the central skill is one they cannot perform.
Genuinely useful: explaining an unfamiliar term or iconographic convention; providing historical context quickly; suggesting scholarly directions to investigate; helping structure an argument; drafting and tightening prose, which matters in a writing-heavy discipline; and translating passages from older scholarship in French, Italian, German or Spanish, much of which is untranslated.
⚠⚠ Where it fails, and the failures are severe here:
- Fabricated attributions, dates and provenance. Models assign works to the wrong artist, invent paintings that do not exist, and state contested attributions as settled. ⚠ Attribution is one of the genuinely difficult problems in this field — scholars disagree about Rembrandt's autograph works, and the Rembrandt Research Project spent decades on it. A confident one-line answer is a warning sign.
- Invented citations. Plausible-looking articles, in plausible journals, by real scholars who did not write them. ⚠ Every source in a paper for this course must be one you have opened.
- Flattened scholarly debate. Alpers and Gombrich disagree about Dutch painting for reasons that are the substance of the field; a model produces a consensus that does not exist.
- Describing images it has not seen properly — details, compositions and inscriptions confidently misreported.
⚠⚠ The thing no tool can do is the thing the course is for: standing in front of a painting and seeing what is there. Formal analysis is a trained perception, built by looking at many works attentively, and it cannot be acquired by reading descriptions of them — generated or otherwise. The Ringling is an hour or two from most of this state's campuses. Go.
Academic integrity: the written analysis is the assessment in this course. Read your syllabus; where AI assistance is permitted for drafting, the looking, the argument and the evidence must be yours.