Rice students encounter Gothic world where it still stands

Rice students encounter Gothic world where it still stands

Paris Through the Ages brought Paris Summer Program’s art history students face-to-face with cathedrals they studied

A student can spend a semester with images of Sainte-Chapelle and still be unready for the moment the chapel’s walls of stained glass rise around them. For the Rice University undergraduates in Paris Through the Ages, that moment came in Week 1.

“Nothing prepares you for a cathedral,” said Denva Gallant, associate professor of art history at Rice. “You can see as many slides and television shows as you like, but the feeling when you go inside is different. In their final reflections, many students wrote about how different churches had different energies and about the play of light.”

Taught during Session 1 of the Rice Global Paris Summer Program, the three-week course traced early European art and architecture from Romanesque foundations through Gothic masterworks into their echoes in modern and contemporary art. Mornings began with lectures at the Rice Global Paris Center, and each afternoon the class carried the day’s material into the city itself from the Basilica of Saint-Denis and Chartres Cathedral to the Musée de Cluny.

“There are so many beautiful resonances in the art of Paris,” Gallant said. “I couldn’t imagine not using Paris as a space to introduce students to medieval and Gothic art.”

Some of those doors would have stayed closed without help. Gallant credited the Paris Center staff with making the course’s most coveted visit possible.

“Sainte-Chapelle in the summer is extremely difficult to get into,” Gallant said. “They made it happen.”

The rhythm of site visits changed the classroom dynamic as well, giving students room to approach Gallant with questions that a lecture hall rarely invites.

“Without the pressure of the school year, you don’t have to perform knowledge,” she said. “It really opened up a space for dialogue and honesty, and it was so nice to get to know the students in multiple dimensions.”

By the course’s end, what students carried home mattered more to Gallant than any inventory of facts.

“This was not just fact learning for me; it was experiential,” she said. “I want them to understand these spaces, because that is the thing they can take home with them. It is intangible.”

The Paris Summer Program is open to Rice undergraduates, who earn academic credit alongside an international experience. Learn more on the Rice Global website.