History of Art

2024/2025

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

6

ECTS credits

Delivered at:

Department of History

Course type:

Elective course

When:

1 year, 3, 4 module

Instructor

Chunikhin, Kirill

Course Syllabus

Abstract

How to perceive art in the twenty-first century? What should we know about ancient Greek sculpture to admire (or dislike) a work of contemporary art? How to be critical of what you see? The goal of this course is to empower students with analytical optics for interpreting art. Considering milestone episodes from art history, students will get a basic understanding of the evolution of visual thinking during last millennium. Besides focusing on traditional forms of art such as painting, architecture, or sculpture, we will also consider diverse phenomena of visual culture broadly defined (such as advertisement, book illustration, maps, etc.). A practical goal of this course is to help master students to find and analyze a visual source, relevant to his or hers particular topic. Studies of art history will be parallel to studies of art theory. What elements constitute an image? How do these elements relate to each other? How words and images cooperate / conflict within a work of visual art? Finally, how to understand what you see? An encounter with a visual phenomenon may start with a formal analysis, i.e. from understanding its structure. This course introduces major aspects of the poetics and the rhetoric of pictorial languages applied elsewhere, from fine arts to computer design. In the course, we will be reading samples of theories by Russian and Soviet scholars (Pavel Florensky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Boris Uspensky, and others) and by Western scholars (Meyer Shapiro, Svetlana Alpers, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and others) in order to develop our visual literacy. Special attention will be paid to art of the twentieth century and Russian and Soviet art in a global context.