Through the investigation of selected primary and secondary sources, students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain the importance of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, how and why it was constructed, why it was converted from a church to a mosque by the Ottomans in 1453, how its design inspired later western architects and why the great building is seen today as a cultural masterpiece.

Through the use of various primary and secondary sources, students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain Giotto’s role in revolutionizing artistic techniques in the late medieval period, how he used linear perspective to add a three-dimensional quality to his two-dimensional paintings and frescoes, and why he was so important to the Renaissance artists that would follow him over a century later.

Through the use of various primary and secondary sources, students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain why building the dome on Florence’s Duomo presented such a daunting task and Filippo Brunelleschi’s mathematical and engineering solutions to the problems. In an alternate and separate in-class activity, students will also try to replicate Brunelleschi’s dome using man-made materials (sugar cubes and play-doh) to understand the challenges of such an undertaking.

Through the use of various primary and secondary sources, students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain the story behind the construction and style used in designing, building and decorating St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, how and why the saint’s bones are in Venice in the first place when he died in Alexandria, and how the church became a symbol of Venetian wealth and power by the early Renaissance.

Through an in-depth analysis of various primary and secondary sources, students in this lesson will identify, understand and be able to explain Walter Gropius’s ideas behind internationalism, how the Bauhaus School in its different forms tried to promote itself as a vanguard institution dedicated to modernist ideas, and finally why the school collapsed in an era of volkish hyper-nationalism that sought to define for the world what it meant to be “German.”