A small sculpted figure with a horned head and open mouth kneels on a creature beneath its knees, raising one arm upward and holding a short blade in the other hand; the textured sculpture appears made of clay or stone and is photographed against a plain gray background.

HA 340/546/550

Chinese Sculpture

From the Bronze Age through the 20th century, Chinese sculpture has expressed China's religious traditions: common beliefs in immortality and the afterlife, the imported faith of Buddhism, native folk deities and the Daoist religion, and the modern cult of Communism. The goals of this class are to sharpen our visual acuity and our powers of art-historical description, in addition to learning the great monuments of sculpture and strengthening our skills in analyzing secondary scholarship. Lectures will emphasize formal analysis, comparative stylistic analysis, social history, and original documents. Discussion readings will sample other methodologies.