Years 2 and 3

*Below you will find examples of Part II Option Papers that have run in recent years. Please note that papers vary from year to year.

Michaelmas

Landscape Painting in China, ca. 900–ca. 1500 – Dr Henning von Mirbach

This Option Paper offers an introduction to the history and interpretation of landscape painting from the late Tang to the early Ming dynasty (ca. 900–1500), the period during which landscape emerged as the preeminent painting genre in China. Through seven thematic lectures, students will trace the genre’s development from its early religious and philosophical associations to its central role in literati culture. Topics include the aesthetics of reclusion and spiritual ascent, courtly patronage and imperial symbolism, the politics of exile, the rise of personal expression, and the enduring significance of brushwork. By examining key artists, regional styles, and shifting historical contexts, the Option Paper explores how landscape painting functioned not only as a visual art but also as a vehicle for cultural values, social critique, and individual identity.

New York Modern: Painting, History, Abstraction, 1945-1969 – Dr Saul Nelson

This option paper will introduce students to American painting in the wake of World War Two. We will encounter key concepts and debates from the history of modern art, around the emergence and meaning of abstraction; the changing role of the avant-garde; the function and value of tradition within modernism; and the political possibilities of representation. The artists who became known as Abstract Expressionists will be central to our narrative – not just well-known names such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, but also those who are sometimes written out of the histories: Joan Mitchell, Norman Lewis, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler. We will also consider mid-century American painters like Rose Piper, Jacob Lawrence, and Larry Rivers, who resisted the call to abstraction altogether, particularly when this resistance was seen as the condition for a kind of politicised representation capable of attending to the realities of race, class, and gender. 

Students will learn to interpret modernist painting, as well as to locate it in its historical context. We will study the growth of American economic and military power in the aftermath of the war, the emergence of New York as the new global hub for the avant-garde, and the progress of movements for political emancipation like the Civil Rights Movement and Feminism. We will read key contemporary writers, such as the critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Elaine de Kooning, and Michael Fried, and the poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery – as well as studying how this period has since been written up by major art historians like TJ Clark, Rosalind Krauss, and Griselda Pollock.

Visions of Knowledge: Art and Learning in the Medieval West – Dr Laura Slater

This paper will introduce students to medieval manuscripts in Cambridge collections and their value as sources for exploring cultures of learning in medieval Europe, c. 1000-1350. The medieval period is sometimes dismissed as a time of superstition, ignorance and uncritical adherence to unquestioned and unchanging religious and intellectual authorities. This paper will challenge these assumptions. 

Through first-hand examination of manuscripts wherever possible, students will trace the significance of visual images in medieval knowledge production and scientific enquiry. They will explore the enduring role of the monasteries in learning and scholarship, the rise of schools and universities and debate the so-called ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’ in medieval Europe. Ranging across science, theology and the liberal arts, they will examine changing approaches to history, classical antiquity and Scripture and ideas about medicine, cosmology and the natural world. Students will consider the translation of scientific knowledge and learning from the Islamicate world and the wider impact of new ways of seeing, thinking and reading on ordinary people. 

• Students will gain specialist knowledge of medieval Western European manuscripts across a range of genres, periods and styles.
• They will gain understanding of central and later medieval Western European intellectual history across multiple areas of scientific and scholarly enquiry.
• They will examine the role of images and visual culture in medieval learning, scholarship and the communication of knowledge.
• They will consider the transmission and translation of knowledge across linguistic, geographic and confessional boundaries.

Painting in Paris 1715-1863 – Professor Caroline van Eck

Painters in Paris from the end of the reign of Louis XIV in 1715 to the death of Delacroix in 1863 were constantly developing new styles and genres, and negotiated a rapid series of changes in patronage, collecting, art criticism, and the role of audiences. Where 1863 is often presented as the year when modern painting began, with the exhibition of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, this course argues that French painters engaged in all kinds of Modernity as early as 1715. Antiquity lost its authority, new styles and genres were developed, women became major actors as artists, patrons and collectors, and the public acquired an independent and often unruly voice. All this happened against the background of France's colonial empire, the fundamental upheavals of the French Revolution, Napoleon's Empire, the restauration of the Bourbons and the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1851. The course will examine how painting in Paris changed the face of art, and how Paris became a laboratory where artists, patrons, collectors and critics went through a series of revolutions in style that often echoed, and sometimes shaped, social and political revolutions.

Architecture between art and science in the Renaissance and Baroque periods – Dr Yelda Nasifoglu

In this course we will study the development of architecture in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, contextualising it in the cultural, intellectual, and political landscape of early modern Europe. Among the themes covered will be the humanistic revival of classical knowledge; the figure of the architect, including their training and tools; early print culture; concepts of nature and artifice; and the phenomenon of the architect-scientist. Particular attention will be given to the development and use of drawing techniques by artists, architects, as well as scientists, supported by visits to rare book and museum collections.

Lent

Landscape Painting in Early Modern China, ca. 1500–ca. 1800 – Dr Henning von Mirbach

This Option Paper introduces students to the history of landscape painting in China from ca. 1500–ca. 1800 and provides a thematic introduction to major artistic trends during that period. Together, we will explore the shifting meanings and functions of landscape painting during a period that was marked by vibrant artistic innovation, the rise of an art market, and the dramatic transition from Ming (1368–1644)  to Qing (1644–1911) rule, among other factors. Emphasis will be placed on landscape paintings as a cultural act and as a site of identity formation and negotiation. Through seven thematic lectures, students will learn how artists engaged with evolving ideals of literati identity, responded to political upheaval, and negotiated changing systems of patronage. From the refined brushwork of Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) to the theoretical interventions of Dong Qichang (1555–1636), from loyalist expression to Qing orthodoxy, the course highlights how landscape painting served as a site for cultural memory, personal agency, and regional imagination in early modern China. The Option Paper concludes with a look at an epistemological shift in the understanding of painting’s functions on the eve of the eighteenth century, situating landscape painting within broader trends in material and visual culture. 

German Renaissance Graphic Art, 1470-1530 – Professor Alexander Marr, Elenor Ling and Harry Metcalfe

This innovative, object-led course offers an introduction to the making, meaning, curation, and conservation of German Renaissance prints. It will be taught seminar-style in the Fitzwilliam Museum, exclusively through its world-class collection of works on paper by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Burgkmair, and Martin Schongauer. Team-taught by academic, curatorial, and conservation staff, students will learn about the iconography, materials and techniques, economics, collecting history, curation, and conservation of works on paper. Studying woodcuts, copperplate engravings, etchings, and metalcuts, the class will learn about sites of production, workshop practices, genres and markets. Students will have opportunities to handle works from the collection and examine them closely, including through the microscope. The class will not only explore individual artists’ oeuvres but will also develop object-specific skills, such as identifying paper types, sheet structure, and watermarks; establishing the ‘state’ of a print; and the conservation history and needs of works on paper (retouching, repair, damage to the matrix). Alongside discussion of the innovative subject-matter developed by artists in response to the Reformation and revival of antiquity, we will consider styles and techniques, such as prepared paper, chiaroscuro printing, and hand-colouring. The course will be structured around major sites of production in the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire, with on-site classes supported by preliminary reading and supervisions on individual artists and notable commissions (e.g. the Imperial projects of Maximilian I).

From Romanesque to Gothic: Art and Architecture in Medieval England c.1050-1300 – Dr Laura Slater

This paper will provide an overview of art and architecture in medieval England from the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the close of the Gothic period around 1300. Students will trace the cultural impact of the Conquest, explore how families and communities adjusted to living under new Norman rulers and consider how the Conquest changed the Normans themselves. We will assess the rise of the Gothic style and its development in different English regions, examining it in relation to the medieval cult of saints and relics and movements of religious reform and renewal. We will consider debates over Gothic ‘naturalism’ and explore how far medieval artists and audiences were experimenting with new ways of seeing and understanding the world around them. A course field trip to a medieval English cathedral will consider some of these questions in situ. Throughout the course, students will situate medieval art and architecture in its social and political as well as religious and devotional contexts. 

• Students will gain specialist knowledge of the art and architecture of medieval England, tracing the development of the Romanesque and Gothic styles from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries.
• They will gain understanding of the medieval cult of saints and relics, movements of religious reform and renewal and the roles played by art and visual culture in clerical, monastic and lay devotional lives. 
• They will examine the political functions and meanings of medieval art in relation to the Norman Conquest and later Plantagenet rulership. 
• The course will cover a range of media, including architecture, manuscript painting and illumination, stained glass and sculpture.     

Global Modernisms: Art and Decolonisation – Dr Saul Nelson 

Modernism was born in an age of colonial empires. In 1907, when Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – a work that used the encounter with the art of colonised West Africa to break through to a new clarity of artistic form – 560 million people (over a quarter of the world’s population) lived under some form of colonial rule. By the time of Picasso’s death in 1973, Europe’s empires had largely vanished. Wars had been fought. Forms of resistance had been practiced. Newly independent nation-states had emerged, composed of liberated subjects who built their own relation to the arts of industrial modernity. 

This Option Paper will track the complex relationship between modernism and colonialism as it evolved over the first two thirds of the Twentieth Century. We will move from the first uses of the word modernismo – far from Europe, in the writings of a Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío – to experiments with cubist design and aesthetic theory carried out under British rule in India; from collaborations between modernists and colonial authorities in Africa, India, and the Caribbean to attempts to mobilise modernism in the service of anticolonial revolutions and postcolonial nation-building. Besides well-known modernists such as Picasso, Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo, and Le Corbusier, special consideration will be given to artists and contexts from outside the traditional canon of modernist studies. Students will encounter figures such as the Haitian painter Hector Hippolyte, the Brazilian modernist Tarsila do Amaral, and the Indian sculptor Nek Chand. Close attention will be paid to contemporary literature, in particular to attempts by figures such as Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frantz Fanon to theorise the relation between modernism and colonialism. 

Sculpting Seventeenth-Century England – Dr Charlotte Davis

This paper will chart the transformation of sculpture from a craft profession to a fine art discipline in England. We begin in the final years of Elizabeth I’s reign. At this time, Renaissance artistic principles were starting to be adopted in English art, although they were by no means the dominant visual culture. By the eighteenth century, following the Act of Union (1707), which marked the birth of Great Britain, classical forms would become the norm. We will explore how the production of sculpture changed within this broader narrative and investigate how sculptors responded to new demands on their profession.

Amongst the tumultuous backdrop of civil war, religious tension, and revolution – and during Britain’s emergence as an imperial power – sculpture communicated for posterity, in apparently permanent media. A key theme will be the varied contexts for sculptural display. In recent years, following the statue of Edward Colston being thrown into Bristol’s harbour, historic public sculptures have faced renewed scrutiny. We will consider how (and if) such works should continue to be displayed.

Architectural Books and Periodicals [Department of Architecture] – Professor James Campbell

This course aims to provide a short introduction to architectural books and periodicals from ancient times to the present day. When we think of architectural books we tend to focus on the writers, but this history looks at how the book is made and how changes in book production changed architectural treatise through the ages. At the same time, it discusses the nature of architectural writing and how its form is related to shifts in the profession and education. The course looks at books from across the world, although, as we shall see, for various reasons in various periods Western European publishing predominated. The reasons for this will explored. The course will also discuss how architectural publishing is currently changing and question whether it has a future and, if so, in what form. 

At the end of the course, students can expect to have acquired knowledge of the key changes in the production of architectural books and periodicals throughout history. They will be able to demonstrate an understanding of the terms used for describing books and their precursors, and be able to describe from looking at it, the form of a particular book, how it was made, and the materials employed in its production. They will have an understanding of the history of architectural publication from its beginnings in the ancient world in scrolls and tablets, to the invention of the codex, the use of different writings surfaces and the introduction of printing, not only in the Western World but across the globe. They will have an understanding of the changes in image reproduction throughout the ages and how these affected the development of illustrated books and architectural books in particular. They will have developed the skills to be able to describe a rare book and to produce a written book description in a standard format used in rare book cataloguing. They will be competent in book assessment and the handling of rare books, and have will be able to talk knowledgeably about architectural books and periodicals and understand the role they have played in shaping architectural design. They will have understand the various types of architectural books and how books on architecture reflected changing ideas about the notion of architecture and the architectural profession. 

*Below you will find examples of Part II Option Papers that have run in recent years. Please note that papers vary from year to year.

Italian Art and Architecture in the Age of Giotto – Professor Donal Cooper

Michaelmas – Giotto: Medieval or modern? (Paper 1)

Italy’s artistic culture underwent a revolution in the decades around 1300 – a seismic shift towards more naturalistic modes of representation most strongly associated with Giotto di Bondone (c.1267-1337). This course disentangles the Florentine master from Vasarian myth and leaves behind interminable attribution debates to reassess the artist’s achievements within the context of his own time. We draw on new research which offers a coherent reading of Giotto’s career and works that was not available to previous generations of art historians. Florence provides a natural focus, but beyond Tuscany the course examines a range of major artistic centres where Giotto worked: Rome, where the papacy energetically renewed the eternal city’s ancient and early Christian past; Assisi, headquarters of the Franciscan Order and site of the peninsula’s most intensive concentration of fresco cycles; and Padua, where the city’s vibrant university encouraged artists to engage with classical antiquity and the new science of optics. While organized chronologically, the course encourages you to problematize the interpretative framework of artistic biography, and to consider Giotto’s artistic practice as both fundamentally medieval in its workshop organization and profoundly modern in its entrepreneurial energy.

Lent 2026 – Siena: Workshops and rivals in a medieval city (Paper 2) 

This course addresses the art of Siena during what is often considered the city’s golden age, from the defining victory over Florence at the battle of Montaperti in 1260 to the Black Death of 1348, which killed a third of the citizenry including many of the city’s leading artists. We build on recent research undertaken for the exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery, London, 2024-25) and the critical debates and responses it engendered. Our principal focus will be on the painters Duccio, Simone Martini, and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, but the course also addresses architecture, sculpture, and the so-called decorative arts (especially goldsmiths work, for which Siena was one of Europe’s principal centres). The approach is grounded in the close material analysis of paintings, benefitting from ground-breaking research by our colleagues at the Hamilton Keer Institute. Fiercely protective of its artistic traditions (non-Sienese artists were effectively excluded from the city throughout the period), Siena nevertheless emerged as a major exporter of art and luxury objets d’art. We explore how Sienese artists became adept at satisfying both local and international patrons, and how innovation was driven by both collaboration and intense competition between painters of the same generation. 

Global Renaissance Sculpture – Dr Teresa Soley 

Michaelmas (Paper 1)

Part I of this course introduces students to the field of early modern European sculpture, broadly defined, examining the artistic, cultural, and historical contexts that shaped it. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, the art of sculpture provided a direct link with Classical Antiquity while also offering a medium for remarkable invention; its study offers an ideal means through which to consider the cultural developments and ideas that contributed to the Renaissance. This course will focus predominantly on Italy but will also include the study of artworks, artists, and patrons in Iberia, England, and Northern Europe to offer additional context and to further familiarise students with the ways that sculpture was viewed and understood in this period. In addition to exploring the creative and intellectual roles of sculptor and patron throughout this course, attention will be devoted to the politics of art and mechanisms of artistic transmission. A thorough understanding of key issues in early modern European sculpture will provide a foundation for the study of extra-European artistic traditions in Lent Term.

Through a combination of lectures, readings, and visual analysis of physical artworks, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the sources, methods, challenges and ambitions of early modern sculptors. Weekly lectures will delve into diverse forms of sculpture, analysing the techniques, materials, and themes that defined this medium. We will explore the patronage systems and workshop practices that supported and shaped the creation of sculpture in this period. By the end of this course, students will not only have gained an understanding of the aesthetic and technical significance of Italian Renaissance sculpture, but also an appreciation of its enduring legacy in the broader context of the history of art. 

Lent (Paper 2)

Sculpted objects have been created, conceptualised, and utilised by remarkably diverse cultures throughout the world. Building on the knowledge of European sculpture acquired in Michaelmas Term, Part II of this Option Paper adopts a global perspective on early modern sculptural practice. It introduces major artistic traditions in the Americas, West Africa, South and East Asia, and examines the artistic outcomes of cross-cultural entanglements resulting from imperial expansion.

Sculpture was a crucial medium for religious and political art and served as an essential means of recording and commemorating peoples, events, and beliefs. Its versatility and universality also made it an ideal art form for cultural transmission. This course highlights indigenous and hybrid sculptural forms, as well as the reciprocal networks of material and cultural exchange that shaped the arts in this period. It also considers the creation, display, and destruction of sculpture in colonial contexts, approaching these phenomena from both indigenous and colonising perspectives.

 Through lectures, readings, and direct engagement with physical artworks, students will become familiar with extra-European artistic cultures as well as important historiographic developments. We will investigate a wide range of sculptural practices and contexts, providing the tools to analyse techniques, media, and iconography within distinct cultural frameworks. Engaging with cutting-edge scholarship, this course  offers new directions for art historical study and addresses issues of race, representation, and Eurocentrism to help define the place of sculpture in the emerging field of Global Renaissance studies.

Film and Visual Culture: Histories and Theories – Dr Xin Peng and Dr Kareem Estefan

Michaelmas – Histories of Film Theory (Dr Xin Peng) [Paper 1]

Michaelmas Term surveys the field of film theory from a historical approach. We start by asking what “theory” means, and why the notion of “theory” itself seems to be inherently Eurocentric. Tracing early attempts at theorising film’s unique and unprecedented capacity, we interrogate the racial, sexual, and gender politics central to the intellectual enterprise, and consider the aesthetic and ideological implications of specific cinematic techniques. We interrogate important critical categories such as spectatorship and the auteur, and study key traditions of cultural and political critiques that foreground the cinema’s ideological power and its revolutionary potential. The term ends with the so-called “affective turn” in film studies that finds affinity between the “film’s body” and our corporeality. Though structured chronologically, each week contains conceptual portals that take us back and forth across the historical timeline, encouraging critical dialogues to be built between different generations of thinkers that engaged with the distinct yet hybridising and elusive medium of film. 

Lent – Theories of Visual Culture (Dr Kareem Estefan) [Paper 2]

What is visuality? How are ‘ways of seeing’ produced and contested by cultural, political and technological forces? How is studying ‘visual culture’ distinct from studying art history? Proceeding from these questions, this term’s portion of the Film and Visual Culture course will introduce critical theories of visuality and interdisciplinary approaches to visual culture. We will examine contemporary visual culture across a range of media, platforms and institutional contexts, with particular attention to decolonial and global South practices. This includes video, painting, photography, multimedia and installation art exhibited in galleries and museums, cinema projected in theatres and streamed online, and photographs and videos shared via social media. We will consider how such (audio)visual media both reflect and shape perception, relate to their networks of circulation and intervene in the world.

Peggy Guggenheim: Art and Love – Dr Verity Mackenzie

Michaelmas (Paper 1)

Lent (Paper 2) 

“I am not an art collector. I am a museum” claimed Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979), who appeared at the 1942 opening of her New York gallery Art of This Century wearing an earring made for her by Tanguy in one ear and one by Calder in the other. Provocateur, libertine, patron of Pollock, married to Max Ernst, friend of Djuna Barnes and living in a museum, Guggenheim inhabited modern art as much as she collected it, shifting with the centre of art production from Paris to New York in 1942. A supporter of European avant-gardes and Abstract Expressionism in the USA, Guggenheim’s activities overlap with modernist literature, psychoanalysis, politics and gender studies, and her autobiographies weave art criticism, self-reflection, confession, cultural commentary and myth. 

A Jewish American woman working across national boundaries in a male-dominated field spanning Paris, London, New York and Venice, Guggenheim’s galleries, Guggenheim Jeune and Art of This Century actively promoted the avant-garde and the underrepresented, including women and those in exile. This course critically examines her transatlantic network, considering her writing, collecting, patronage, curating and self-fashioning in light of questions around gender, cultural transmission, exile, identity and the ethics of collecting in wartime. Uniting Cubism, Dada, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, Guggenheim used her personal fortune to buy art at the rate of “a picture a day”, but she also funded the rescue of artists from fascist Europe, supported their careers and reframed rules around taste, gender and collecting. 

Guggenheim’s work laid the foundations for the Guggenheim Foundation and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, while her relationship with the Venice Biennale establishes her in the context of global networks of art and diplomacy. The course ranges across biography, institutional critique, modernist performance and contemporary politics to explore Guggenheim’s intersections with artists including Picasso, Brancusi, Duchamp, Ernst, Pollock, Rothko, Carrington, Kahlo, Calder and Tanning, alongside her engagement with curators and art critics including Barr and Read, and writers including Barnes, Breton and Beckett.

The British City in its Global Context – Dr Matthew Walker

Michaelmas – Plague, Fire, and Colonisation (Paper 1)

This paper will introduce students to the British city and its architecture in the long eighteenth century. This was a dynamic period in British urban and architectural history when cities transformed from small-scale dense, organically planned entities with small-scale light industries, into large, planned, increasingly industrialised metropolises with global connections. Along the way, the wholesale influence of the Renaissance and classical antiquity fundamentally changed how cities looked, and key developments in the country’s religion, politics, and culture affected how people lived and worked in the urban realm. The British also built cities in their newly acquired colonies that, though they took their cues from home, came with new challenges and requirements of their own. The paper will run broadly chronologically with key themes guiding each week. Along the way, students will be introduced to key architectural developments as well as important themes in the social and cultural history of the period. It will also have a theoretical element built into the lectures and supervisions, and we will use buildings as case studies to explore key works of architectural, urban, and cultural theory. Featuring topics such as public health, crime and punishment, religion, and imperialism, the paper should appeal to a wide range of students in both the History of Art and Architecture.

Lent – Industry, Immigration, and Gentrification (Paper 2)

The story of the British city in the period from the 1830s to the present day is one of the most exciting in all urban history. Through a revolution in industry, places such as Manchester and Liverpool went from small towns to huge metropolises almost overnight. Heavy industry, though, brought huge social, economic, and medical problems that the Victorians tried, and largely failed, to overcome. At the same, Britain sat at the heart of a huge empire, which also left a profound mark on its cities. In the twentieth century, British cities underwent violent transformation in the Blitz, and then rapid deindustrialization. At the same time, successive waves of immigration brought new cultures and religions to the British urban sphere. This century has seen the reversal of suburbanization and considerable financial challenges associated with gentrification. This paper will run broadly chronologically and will chart the architectural and social history of British cities in this most dramatic of periods. Along the way, we will explore questions of architectural style, from the gothic revival to modernism, brutalism, and postmodernism, and broader social and cultural issues such as the creation of local authorities, the rise of the welfare state, and the economic policies of the Thatcher years. Covering architectural, urban, social, political, and economic history, the paper should appeal to a wide range of students in both the History of Art and Architecture.