--- title: Art History description: Art History is the study of visual art throughout human history. You will understand how cultural, political, and technological contexts shaped artistic movements, and develop the skills to analyze and interpret paintings, sculptures, and architecture. category: arts-design subcategory: art-history-and-criticism difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/art-history --- # Art History Art History is the study of visual art throughout human history. You will understand how cultural, political, and technological contexts shaped artistic movements, and develop the skills to analyze and interpret paintings, sculptures, and architecture. ## Where to start Start with smarthistory.org, which offers free, student-friendly short videos and essays by experts analysing major artworks, movements and contexts worldwide. If you only use one resource, make it Helen Gardner's Art Through the Ages, the standard global survey textbook covering architecture, sculpture, painting and craft across every major culture. For a single-narrative history of Western art, add E.H. Gombrich's The Story of Art. ## Available Resources 5 Books • 2 Courses • 5 Websites ## Websites ### 1. Google Arts & Culture Google's partnership with over 2,000 museums puts high-resolution artworks, gigapixel scans, virtual gallery walkthroughs, and curated exhibits online. Browsing by artist, movement, medium, or period builds visual familiarity with works you would otherwise never see in person. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://artsandculture.google.com/ **Tags:** museum collections, virtual tours, digital archives, art history ### 2. Art History Basics Khan Academy and Smarthistory introductory unit on the foundations of art history: why looking at art matters, formal analysis of composition, line and colour, and the materials and techniques behind painting, sculpture and other media. Learners can describe and analyse artworks systematically. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history-basics **Tags:** art-history, formal-analysis, art-materials, visual-analysis ### 3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Timeline The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline pairs objects from the museum's collection with essays organized by region and period, from 8000 B.C. onward. Readers come away able to place a work geographically and chronologically and to see cross-cultural contemporaries. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ **Tags:** art history timeline, museum collections, world art, chronology ### 4. smarthistory.org Smarthistory.org provides free, student-friendly art history resources through expert-led short videos and concise essays that analyze major artworks, movements, and cultural contexts from around the world. It features visual analyses, contextual histories, and thematic comparisons suitable for students and educators. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://smarthistory.org **Tags:** websites, arts-design, art-history ### 5. getty.edu/art Getty.edu/art is a scholarly resource hub from the J. Paul Getty Trust offering high‑quality images from the Getty collections, scholarly essays, and teaching materials for exploring art history, artists, artworks, and art movements. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://getty.edu/art **Tags:** websites, arts-design, art-history ## Courses ### 1. Art History Basics Explore art history from ancient to modern times! This course covers major movements, artists, and techniques. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history **Tags:** art history survey, art movements, western art, visual analysis ### 2. Modern Art Museum of Modern Art course that uses works from MoMA's collection to trace how artists from the late 1800s onward responded to industrialization, war and new technologies, teaching learners to connect artworks with the ideas that shaped them. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-art-ideas **Tags:** courses, arts-design, art-history ## Podcasts ### 1. The Art History Babes **Author:** Recorded History Podcast Network Conversational podcast in which four art historians discuss artworks, artists, movements, and visual culture, alongside short episodes of quick art-history facts. Listeners pick up context on periods and debates in the field in an informal, seminar-style format. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.arthistorybabes.com/ **Tags:** art-history, visual-culture, artists, art-criticism ### 2. The Lonely Palette **Author:** Tamar Avishai Welcome to The Lonely Palette, the podcast that returns art history to the masses, one painting at a time. Each episode, host Tamar Avishai picks a painting du jour, interviews unsuspecting museum visitors in front of it, and then dives deeply into the object, the movement, the social context, and anything and everything else that will make it as neat to you as it is to her. For more information, visit thelonelypalette.com | Twitter @lonelypalette | Instagram @thelonelypalette. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.thelonelypalette.com **Tags:** painting analysis, close looking, art appreciation, museum art ### 3. ArtCurious **Author:** Jennifer Dasal/ArtCurious Think art history is boring? Think again. It's weird, funny, mysterious, enthralling, and liberating. Join us as we cover the strangest stories in art. Is the Mona Lisa fake? Did Van Gogh actually kill himself? And why were the Impressionists so great? Subscribe to us here, and follow us at www.artcuriouspodcast.com for further information and fun extras. © 2023 Jennifer Dasal **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.artcuriouspodcast.com/artcuriouspodcast/ **Tags:** artist biography, art mysteries, western art, art history stories ## Books ### 1. The Story of Art **Author:** E.H. Gombrich Gombrich's single-narrative survey traces Western art from cave painting to modern experiment, explaining why artists changed course rather than cataloguing masterpieces. Readers finish with a coherent chronological framework and a sense of how each period answered the previous one. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0714822779?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, arts-design, art-history ### 2. Art Through the Ages **Author:** Helen Gardner The standard global survey textbook, covering architecture, sculpture, painting, and craft across every major culture with dense illustration and formal analysis. Working through it gives systematic coverage of periods, monuments, and vocabulary that shorter narrative histories skip. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0155037609?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, arts-design, creative-arts ### 3. The Power of Art **Author:** Simon Schama Simon Schama's companion to his BBC series, telling the story of eight works by Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko. Readers see how personal crisis and political pressure shaped each work's power. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0563487100?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** art-history, western-art, painting, sculpture, art-appreciation ### 4. Photography: The Definitive Visual History **Author:** Tom Ang Illustrated DK history of photography over two centuries, from early processes to digital work. It pairs iconic images with biographies of more than 50 photographers, giving readers a chronological grasp of cameras, movements and the medium's influence on society and culture. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0744060095?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** history-of-photography, photographers, visual-culture, photographic-movements ### 5. Ways of Seeing **Author:** John Berger Berger's seven essays, adapted from his BBC series, argue that reproduction, oil painting's link to property, and advertising shape how images are read. It equips you to question who an image was made for. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140135154?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** books, arts-design, art-history --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/art-history