Art Lecture Series

A History of Western Art

How to Look at and Understand Great Art

The World’s Greatest Paintings

A History of Impressionism

Great Artists of the Italian Renaissance

Masterworks of American Art

Art Across the Ages

A History of Western Art

The development of the arts in Europe from the Middle Ages to the modern era is an astonishing record of cultural achievement, from the breathtaking architecture of Gothic cathedrals to the daring visual experiments of the Cubist painters.

A History of European Art is your gateway to this visually stunning story. In 48 beautifully illustrated lectures you will encounter all the landmarks you would expect to find in a comprehensive survey of Western art since the Middle Ages. Works such as Giotto's Arena Chapel, Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece, Leonardo's The Last Supper, Michelangelo's David, Vermeer's View of Delft, Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Picasso's Guernica, and hundreds more.

You will also find works that are completely new to you. Plus you'll be introduced to lesser-known artists—perhaps names you've heard but never connected to specific works—and you'll understand why they deserve to be classed among the great masters.

How to Look at and Understand Great Art

In building your viewing skills, the opening lectures give you practice with the core technical tools for understanding visual art: (Color, Line Composition, Signs and Symbols).

Traveling deeply into the artist's world, you investigate the major genres of drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and painting. You apply your technical knowledge to major works in each genre, exploring the various purposes and types of drawings, the vast spectrum of sculpture and three-dimensional art, and the important traditions within painting and printmaking, with particular attention to how works of art are made.

In the course's final section, you use your newfound skills to explore the major eras and movements in Western art, from the Renaissance to the present. In this unfolding progression, you encounter the stunning diversity of artworks from the early Renaissance to the Baroque and Rococo, from 19th-century Romanticism to Impressionism, from 20th-century Expressionism to Cubism, Surrealism, and Modernism, and finally to Postmodernism and the art of our own times.

By teaching you the artist's visual language and how to "read" it, How to Look at and Understand Great Art gives you an extraordinary key to the full, unforgettable richness of great artworks—their ability to open you up to new ways of seeing, to bring alive the majestic unfolding of history, and to reveal human experience in all its vividness, poignancy, and dynamic About

The World's Greatest Paintings

Great paintings challenge us to understand them, to penetrate their mysteries, and to appreciate their riches. But within the vast history of art, there exist only a small number of paintings that transcend the traditional role of art to become cultural signifiers—works that allow us to comprehend more deeply the world and our place within it.

Taking you from the 14th century to the 20th , this lecture series leads you in a compelling discovery of some of the most significant paintings in Western art.,

Focusing on 65 masterpieces of Western painting, including key works by Giotto, Titian, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Picasso, The World's Greatest Paintings offers you a vivid, visceral encounter with genius, shining light on the unique technical, stylistic, and expressive achievements of each painting.

Beginning with the 14th-century religious masters, you see how painting affirmed the foundations of Christian theology in the glorious images of Duccio, Masaccio, and Grünewald. You see how painters responded dramatically to political events in David's stark portrayal of the assassinated Jean-Paul Marat and in Delacroix's allegorical Liberty Leading the People. And you see Western social culture eloquently revealed in scenes of life by Bruegel, Steen, Hals, and Manet.

Rather than tracing particular schools or "isms," the lectures are arranged chronologically, showing what painters of contrasting traditions and cultures were doing in the same time periods, thus following the progressive unfolding of each painter's art. And with most lectures limited to only two to three paintings, you enjoy the rare chance to hear an expert talk at length about each carefully selected work.

From Monet to van Gogh: A History of Impressionism

They appeared in a period of upheaval. They saw the rebuilding of Paris, the rise of industrialism, the ruin of the Franco-Prussian war. They displayed their startling and shocking works in a series of exhibitions from 1874 to 1886. And by the 1890s, this "loose coalition" of artists who rebelled against the formality of the French Academy had created the most famous artistic movement in history. "They" were the Impressionists, a movement that created a new, intensely personal vision of the world.

Whether the subject was a city street, a holiday beach, a harvest field, or a demoiselle's boudoir, they virtually invented the sensibility—urbane, contemporary, ever-changing—that today we take for granted as the "modern."

These artists documented life in the latter half of the 19th century and provided models of behavior, decorum, and urban beauty that persist to this day. This series of lectures will introduce you to the style, subject, and function of Impressionist painting by artists including Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh.

One of the legacies of Impressionism is to leave the viewer with a profound sense of life—of life captured on the canvas, through motion, light, and color, and life lived by these remarkable artists, always seeking to experience and to learn, to better capture the reality before their eyes.

This course is an absorbing lesson in the marvelous cultural, historical, and visual experiences that great paintings provide.

Great Artists of the Italian Renaissance

No era of artistic achievement is as renowned as the Renaissance, and no country holds a higher place in that period than Italy. The supreme works created in Florence, Rome, Venice, and other Italian cities by such masters as Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian have never equaled and have established a canon of beauty that pervades Western culture to this day.

To view these works is to enter a world that is incomparably rich, filled with emotion and drama that is palpable, though sometimes mysterious to our modern sensibility.

To study these works with an expert is to penetrate that mystery and gain a new appreciation for how these masterpieces were created and what they meant to the artists and people of the time.

These lectures cover art history at the times of the Early Renaissance and the High Renaissance, which extended from about 1400 to about 1520. Italy is the first and principal location of the Renaissance, and it was in Florence that it took its deepest root.

The word renaissance means rebirth, and it is the name given to the transition from medieval to modern times in Europe, when the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman culture sparked a creative revolution in the humanities, the sciences, and the arts.

Humanism, a philosophical, literary, and artistic ideal, went hand in hand with this rebirth. It emphasized the dignity and potential of humanity and inspired secular studies, as well as the creation of art that reflected the forms and ideas of the Classical era. Renaissance society—and art—was permeated with religion.

In the arts, this new approach encompassed powerful new techniques for representing the human figure and the visible world, and also new attitudes about the roles of artists in society. From a modest rank as craftsman, the artist gradually rose to a status comparable to poets and philosophers.

Masterworks of American Art

A nation's identity is expressed through its art. Great painters capture the essence of a culture's brightest hopes, deepest anxieties, and most profound aspirations. They provide an aesthetic road map to a nation's history, recording the lives of its citizens and reflecting the personality of an entire people.

In Masterworks of American Art. this sweeping survey encounters the brilliant paintings of the homegrown masters who documented the birth of our nation from its colonial roots up to the brink of World War I and the birth of Modernism. As you examine this vital artistic tradition in its historical, cultural, and political contexts, you discover how appreciating the legacy of American art is crucial to fully understanding the story of our great nation.

What you discover is a revolution in art. Sometimes borrowing from European models, just as often departing from them, American artists pioneered new attitudes and styles to express the aspirations of a new nation.

This uniquely American approach to art examines some of the greatest paintings of the tradition within the larger context of our country's history and culture. The result is a grand survey of the American experience, in which some of the most critical eras of this nation's history are viewed through the lens of great art:

• The American Revolution: Great artists captured a new spirit of liberty through scenes of war and government. You examine key examples of their revolutionary approach to art, including The Death of General Wolfe, in which Benjamin West pioneered a new vision of democratic leadership by rendering the British general in contemporary dress.
• The Civil War: You see how this tumultuous period of American history found expression on memorable canvases, such as James Hamilton's symbolic representation of the battered ship of state in Old Ironsides and Winslow Homer's vivid reenactment of skirmishes on the front, Inviting a Shot before Petersburg.
• The Reconstruction: After the war, painters sought to create an image of the nation reunited, as in George P. A. Healy's portrait of The Peacemakers, while others reflected the readjustments of postwar life, as in Homer's A Visit from the Old Mistress.
• The Westward Expansion: Great masters such as Albert Bierstadt, in his monumental canvas Valley of the Yosemite, recorded the natural splendors of a nation pushing westward, while Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's allegorical mural Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way embodied the idea of Manifest Destiny.

With Masterworks of American Art, you view these great works as part of an ever-developing story, in which master artists capture the portrait of a nation as it grows and changes. and you will also enjoy a feast for the eyes, as each painting is shown in rich, full-color reproductions worthy of these great masterpieces.

Art Across the Ages

This lecture series in Western visual art that serves as both a mind-broadening survey and an essential introduction. It is designed to give anyone interested in Western art a firm familiarity with its basics, acquainting you with major artists and styles in various media and providing a broad foundation for deeper exploration.

By giving you a ready grasp of the substance and significance of a vast range of artists and their work, along with a solid knowledge of how those artists and their work fit within art's continuum, this course will add immeasurably to your next visit to a museum or exhibition or simply enhance your pleasure in the art you encounter in your life.1

Topics of this lecture series include: What Is Art?, Greek Art, Hellenistic Art, Hellenistic, Etruscan, and Early Roman Art, Early Christian Art and Its Progeny, The Beginnings of Jewish Art, Christian Medieval Art and Architecture, The Language of Romanesque and Gothic Art, Islamic Art from Abstract to Figurative, Renaissance Painting, Renaissance Sculpture, The Rebirth of Classical Dynamism, 16th-Century Northern European Painting, The Reformation and the Mannerist Crisis, Baroque Shadows, The Counter-Reformation, Revolutions in Spanish and English Painting, France's Gold and Silver Ages, Politics and Romanticism, From Realism to Impressionism, Realism and Its Progeny, Fin de Siècle European Art Movements, Revolutions in Early 20th-Century Painting, Figuration and Abstraction, Developments in Sculpture, New Worlds of Architecture, The Problem of Categories in Modern Art, The Explosion of Modernist Media, Art, and Politics.