080086 SE Seminar: Illustrations of Boccaccio's 'Decamerone' (2020W)

Based on the current Covid 19 pandemic and the curfew or occasional quarantine imposed by the Austrian Federal Government in spring 2020, the seminar will focus on the illustrations of the “Decamerone”: The text, consisting of a framework story and a series of novellas, was written between 1349 and 1353 – probably by Giovanni Boccaccio. The background story describes how a small group of distinguished young people, consisting of seven women and three men, withdrew from plagued Florence in 1348 to a villa in the Florentine countryside. For ten days (which is the Greek derived title of the book) the young people pass the time telling each other short stories. The seminar’s point of entry are two illustrated editions of the 15th-century “Decamerone”, whose miniatures visualize fruitful moments from the individual stories.
The task of the students is to present one novella in the presentation and term paper, to analyze the illustrations iconographically, to deal with the relationship between text and image narratologically, but above all to bring the events told and visualized miniatures to life in short computer-assisted and/or analogue animated videos.
The young company ARTIVIVE https://artivive.com based in Vienna, whose app is used internationally by artists and museums (i.e. the Albertina: cf. Dürer-Rabbit), is grateful to provide students with the software that enables them to view the short films they have created via app on the internet. In this way, the students are not only to deepen their knowledge of art history and interdisciplinary aspects, but also become familiar with a tool that can be used in modern museum education. Web-based information technologies are of particular importance in times of limited travel possibilities and thus impossible physical presence in the collections.

Methods:
Core disciplines of art history (iconography, style analysis, etc.); transdisciplinary approaches (narratology); kinesthetic learning (digital and/or analogue) animation; application of internet capable tools (software by ARTIVIVE). Group work is encouraged!