This unit prepares students for Honours work and careers in the art world by developing research skills in the use of primary sources. It does so by investigating over several centuries and continents the peculiar fortunes of the 'reversed painting' defined as a painting that depicts another painting that the spectator sees from the back, most famously in Velazquez's Las Meninas. This complex pictorial motif is an example of a 'meta-image' that complements current interest in doubled, folded, dialectical, anachronistic and potential images. The special interest of the reversed painting is that its invention is bound up with the dialectic between the visible and the unseen in Gothic art... -- Course Website
Prerequisites: MEMS2001 Classical Traditions and Transformations in Medieval and Early Modern Europe or any Level 2 History of Art core unit
