How to Look at and Understand Great Art [repost]

Great art is among the most sublime, meaningful, and redeeming creations of all civilization. Few endeavors can equal the power of great artwork to capture aesthetic beauty, to move and inspire, to change your perceptions, and to communicate the nature of human experience. Great art is also complex, mysterious, and challenging. Filled with symbolism, cultural and historical references, and often visionary imagery, great artworks oblige us—defy us, even—to reckon with their many meanings.

What does it take to truly know what you're seeing when you look at art? What technical skills and knowledge are needed to comprehend the full richness of artworks, to unpack the hidden significance of master paintings, sculptures, prints, and more?

Award-winning Professor Sharon Latchaw Hirsh of Rosemont College speaks to these and other compelling questions in How to Look at and Understand Great Art. Unlike a traditional survey of art, these 36 richly illustrated lectures take you on an in-depth exploration of the practical skill of viewing art through the lenses of line, light, perspective, composition, and other crucial elements of craft and technique. Using timeless masterpieces of Western painting, sculpture, and graphic art, as well as hands-on studio demonstrations, Professor Hirsh gives you the specific visual and interpretive knowledge you need to approach great artworks, find their deeper meanings, and reach startling new levels of appreciation.

Discovering the Artist's Visual Language

In building your viewing skills, the opening lectures give you practice with the core technical tools for understanding visual art:

Color: You study the essential principles of color and color schemes in painting and graphic art and the distinctive use of color in different epochs, all of which are deeply integral to an artist's work.
Line: You investigate the artist's use of line (the basis of art) as it describes reality, conveys expressive meaning, and gives larger structural impact to an artwork.
Composition: You learn how the artist constructs a work's overall composition in painting, graphic art, and sculpture. You discover compositional features such as symmetry/asymmetry, balance, and the visual framing of images, as keys to an artwork's comprehensive impact.
Signs and symbols: You learn how to recognize symbolism and signifiers in religious paintings, "vanitas" still lifes, canvases of royalty, and seminal works by Gauguin and Dali.

Rich and Varied Genres of Art

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.

Here, Professor Hirsh takes you out of the classroom and into the studio, in a series of hands-on demonstrations you rarely find in an academic art course. In the lectures on painting, for example, you study the techniques of fresco and panel painting, and you see oil painting demonstrated, including the mixing of colors, the application of opaque oils and translucent glazes, and the texturing techniques of impasto and scumbling used so memorably by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and the Expressionists.

In the complex genre of printmaking, you watch a contemporary artist create original prints, showing you the methods of woodcut, copper plate engraving, etching, lithograph, and silkscreen prints. Your understanding of the techniques of printmaking helps you identify the type of print you're looking at—often tricky even for experienced eyes—and gives you an appreciation of the craft underlying master prints by Dürer, Doré, Whistler, Degas, and others.

To deepen your insight into subject matter in art, additional lectures are devoted to the importance of landscapes, portraits, and self-portraits.

Lectures:
1. The Importance of First Impressions
2. Where Am I? Point of View and Focal Point
3. Color—Description, Symbol, and More
4. Line—Description and Expression
5. Space, Shape, Shade, and Shadow
6. Seeing the Big Picture—Composition
7. The Illusion—Getting the Right Perspective
8. Art That Moves Us—Time and Motion
9. Feeling with Our Eyes—Texture and Light
10. Drawing—Dry, Liquid, and Modern Media
11. Printmaking—Relief and Intaglio
12. Modern Printmaking—Planographic
13. Sculpture—Salt Cellars to Monuments
14. Development of Painting—Tempera and Oils
15. Modern Painting—Acrylics and Assemblages
16. Subject Matters
17. Signs—Symbols, Icons, and Indexes in Art
18. Portraits—How Artists See Others
19. Self-Portraits—How Artists See Themselves
20. Landscapes—Art of the Great Outdoors
21. Putting It All Together
22. Early Renaissance—Humanism Emergent
23. Northern Renaissance—Devil in the Details
24. High Renaissance—Humanism Perfected
25. Mannerism and Baroque—Distortion and Drama
26. Going Baroque—North versus South
27. 18th-Century Reality and Decorative Rococo
28. Revolutions—Neoclassicism and Romanticism
29. From Realism to Impressionism
30. Postimpressionism—Form and Content Re-Viewed
31. Expressionism—Empathy and Emotion
32. Cubism—An Experiment in Form
33. Abstraction/Modernism—New Visual Language
34. Dada Found Objects/Surreal Doodles and Dreams
35. Postmodernism—Focus on the Viewer
36. Your Next Museum Visit—Do It Yourself!

Genius of Michelangelo

Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian High Renaissance

Italian Renaissance

Machiavelli in Context

Masters of Greek Thought: Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle

The Art of Critical Decision Making

Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language

Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Rise of Nations

Medieval Europe Crisis and Renewal

Medieval Heroines in History and Legend

Museum Masterpieces: The Louvre

Museum Masterpieces: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Museum Masterpieces: The National Gallery, London