Special thanks Rachel Bower, Nicole Gherry, Livia Alexander, Derek Burdette, Rachel Miller, Kim Richter, and Rachel Barron-Duncan whose voices and insights are featured here.
This video was made possible thanks to the Macaulay Family Foundation
Introduction to Art and Art History
This section of our text is intended to help you get started on a journey of visual and conceptual exploration of the visual arts. After reading about learning to look and about art history, you will read about the language of art.
Learning to look and think critically
A brief introduction to art history, and what it means to learn to look and think critically.
Look closely at this drawing: what do you notice? Do you recognize any specific forms?
In his 1943 drawing América Invertida (Inverted America), Joaquín Torres-García shows the continent of South America turned upside down, with his home country of Uruguay positioned near the center in the top and middle third, and marked with a + and a horizontal line running through it. A prominent ‘Polo S’ at the top of the drawing refers to the South Pole. Why did Torres-García create this inverted map? At first glance, it might appear simple—a minimalistic ink drawing—but with close looking and a deeper understanding of how it relates to other maps and ideas, it becomes clear that the map is anything but simple. In a nutshell, Torres-García was aware of the power of images in constructing worlds and ideas. Let’s consider the map more closely.
Torres-García’s inversion of the South American continent might initially seem jarring—and that is intentional. We are accustomed to seeing maps in which the Northern hemisphere is positioned at the top, and the Southern hemisphere (including South America) is at the bottom. With his drawing, Torres-García wanted people to question why mapmakers defaulted to placing the Northern hemisphere at the top of maps, when in reality the universe is not structured this way—there is no up or down in space. By cleverly rotating the continent 180 degrees, Torres-García highlights the way that maps create meaning and hierarchies, even if we are led to believe that they are objective and free from bias. When he drew this inverted map, Torres-García had for years been trying to transform and overturn the idea that the so-called global north is more significant—that its art is more important and culturally relevant, its histories more complex, and its power greater. Torres-García directly challenged the hierarchy that North is better than South, and he called for South American artists to define art on their own terms rather than in relation to the United States and Europe in the North.
Perhaps you are wondering: why did Torres-García need to challenge the hierarchy of North-South in the first place? His image creatively engages with other maps that are deeply familiar to most of us—so familiar in fact that the view of the world they present has become deeply ingrained in our minds.
The most common map in the world today is the one you see here (above), called the Mercator projection.
It is based on a map made in 1569 by the Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator. Mercator’s earlier map transformed space in a way that would help western European navigators during the so-called “Age of Discovery,” as they explored lands for resources. These travels also led to invasions of lands beyond Europe (such as the Americas) and the eventual establishment of even more global trade routes, colonial settlements, and the transatlantic slave trade.
It was at this moment that Europeans oriented maps to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean was “centered” in world maps (a turn away from earlier European maps that were centered around Jerusalem, a city considered holy by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). As normal as it might appear to us today, the Mercator projection—both the 16th-century original and the map we often see today—is actually heavily distorted, and does not represent the size of landmasses accurately. Take a look at South America on the Mercator projection (again, based on Gerardus Mercator’s earlier map) and compare it to Europe—they look similar in size. Likewise, Africa and Greenland are the same size.
The Gall-Peters projection is a more accurate representation of the size of landmasses—South America is double the size of Europe, and Africa is about fourteen times the size of Antarctica. [1] Torres-García’s Inverted Map calls attention to the problems and biases with mapmaking, and the values attached to places by their perceived size and location.
Torres-García’s map doesn’t just draw our attention to issues with mapmaking though. His drawing also critiques art history: His inversion prompts us to reflect on what is called the art historical canon—the set of art and architecture that over time has received the most attention and prioritization from art historians (and beyond!) and that has been codified as the most important to study and learn about.
We might ask though: who made these decisions? How and why did they make them, and even when were they making them? Whose stories are told, and who gets to tell them?
For a long time, the canon privileged white, male, European and Euro-American art and artists; while that has started to shift, there is much more work to be done to create a more balanced, equitable history of art.
And it has not just been certain types of artists and places that have been privileged, but even certain types of media. For instance, while the canon has often celebrated bronze and marble sculpture, painted wood, alabaster, stucco, and even living rock-cut sculptures have proliferated among peoples throughout time in regions across the world.
Ideally, we could have an art history that not only highlights the marble sculptures of Roman emperors, Michelangelo’s David, or Picasso’s cubist paintings—but also bronze Shang dynasty ewers, the rock-cut churches of Lalibela and the caves of Ellora, the city of Cahokia, the modernist photographs of Lola Álvarez Bravo, and the contemporary Northwest Coast carvings of knowledge bearer and artist Nathan Jackson.
Torres-García’s reframing in América Invertida encourages us to not only look closely at what we see, but also think critically. It prompts us to pause and reflect on how certain geographic regions, art, and artists have been upheld as more important—and how those choices can exclude and marginalize people, or even distort how and what we think about the histories of art. The first time I saw Torres-García’s inversion as an undergraduate student I felt disturbed and even a bit uncomfortable, yet intrigued and reflective. For me, these varied reactions suggested that the image achieved its goal, and still today they remind me of why art and art history matters in the 21st century.
Art not only has the ability to provoke and disturb, but also to comfort and soothe, amuse and captivate. Prompting a different type of response than Torres-García’s small hand-drawn map, at least for me, is being enveloped by a space such as the Gothic Sainte-Chappelle in Paris. The physical experience of this space overwhelms me with its kaleidoscopic stained glass windows that soar upwards, showing more than 1,000 scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Why was it built, and what role did it play in the past and does it still play today? It was in fact a royal chapel, built to house precious Christian relics for the French monarchs, yet the gem-colored space is also a testament to the engineering innovations of the 12th and 13th centuries—delicate glass seems to hold up the building.
Being introduced to unfamiliar artworks can also spark our interest and curiosity in learning more about a culture’s art and history. As a sophomore Biology major in college, I took my first art history classes to fulfill General Education requirements. I will never forget the moment one professor displayed an image from the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, made by a Mixtec (Ñudzahui) artist in what is today Mexico about the epic story of the ruler Lord 8 Deer Jaguar-Claw. I had never seen anything like it before (sadly). To begin to understand the complex picture-writing it involved and to dig deeper into stories and histories that were unknown to me, well, it was as thrilling then as it is today.
As you read this introduction, take a moment to see what catches your eye.
— Kehinde Wiley
Why does art and art history matter?
Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War looms above viewers, encouraging them to consider a more inclusive story of American art and history. The enormous sculpture was exhibited in 2019 in Times Square in New York City and now sits in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. The bronze equestrian sculpture displays an African American man in Nike shoes, a hoodie, and jeans atop a powerful horse who rears upwards as the rider remains calm. The sculpture provides a counterpoint (and counternarrative) to the once-nearby sculpture of Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart. It also draws on centuries of paintings and sculptures of powerful white men on horses. Wiley’s sculpture, and the sculptures of Confederate leaders displayed in Richmond along Monument Avenue until recently, took on new layers of meaning in 2020 as conversations and public protests turned more pointedly to the question of why Black lives matter and to the role of art in public places. As sculptures of Confederate leaders and other white supremacists were toppled, defaced, or removed, many people continued to ask: what is the role of art in public spaces? Why should we care about art at all? How does art challenge problematic narratives or work to uphold them? Can art facilitate reconciliation? Can learning art’s histories make us more empathetic?
Art, or at least the material objects and built spaces that we today refer to as “art,” has always been important. Still, the meanings attached to things and spaces have not only changed over time, but also are culturally constructed. For example, an Inka textile made of camelid fiber was worth far more (symbolically and materially) to them than objects made of gold or silver, and yet for the Spaniards who would invade and topple the Inka Empire in the 1530s, the metals were more desirable.
Another example would be the 18th- and 19th-century European and Euro-American interest in ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, prized in part for their supposed creation in white marble, which inspired new buildings and sculpture. Yet we know now that Greek and Roman sculpture used to be brightly painted in color. Still, individuals in the 18th and 19th centuries equated beauty with pure white marble, transforming how Greco-Roman art was understood and appreciated and establishing biased standards of what constituted “good” art and architecture across media. With the video below about Picasso’s Old Guitarist, you will also consider the idea of beauty, and how it too is culturally constructed (or even a personal preference).
Studying the histories of art is an engaging and important way to consider issues of identity, power and propaganda, race, gender, cross-cultural contact, discrimination and resiliency, spirituality, and more. As the many examples discussed in this textbook address, art did not and does not merely illustrate ideas, but actively encodes them. Moreover, for cultures that did not have a written language, the material and visual record is all the more important because it is the primary way in which we learn about them.
Ever wondered…why study art of the past?
Video Url: https://youtu.be/Vg7m32lID1Q
Cite this page as: Smarthistory, “Ever wondered…why study art of the past?,” in Smarthistory, April 27, 2020, accessed December 29, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/why-study-past-art/.
Must art be beautiful? Picasso’s Old Guitarist
Beth and Steven ask, “Must art be beautiful” looking at Pablo Picasso’s, The Old Guitarist, late 1903 – early 1904, oil on panel, 122.9 × 82.6 cm (Art Institute of Chicago, © 2018 Estate of Pablo Picasso). speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
Video URL: https://youtu.be/PCQ-cnRnMas?si=5FJLQQ8qIwUFQXBW
Additional resources
This painting at the Art Institute of Chicago
Cite this page as: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Must art be beautiful? Picasso’s Old Guitarist,” in Smarthistory, April 15, 2020, accessed December 29, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/beauty-picasso-old-guitarist/.
What does it mean to be an “old master” and to make a “masterpiece”? The artist Kerry James Marshall discusses.
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
Cite this page as: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” in Smarthistory, May 10, 2021, accessed January 2, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/kerry-james-marshall-mastry/.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/K2bmHE7MRQU
Introduction to art history and art historical analysis
Now that we have established why art and art history matters, let’s unpack in more detail what art history is (as a discipline or field of study) and how art historians analyze art. This section provides a foundation for what you will read and begin to do in your introductory art history classes and beyond. It also introduces you to more of the issues confronting art historians today.
What is art history and where is it going?
Art history might seem like a relatively straightforward concept: “art” and “history” are subjects most of us first studied in elementary school. In practice, however, the idea of “the history of art” raises complex questions. What exactly do we mean by art, and what kind of history (or histories) should we explore? Let’s consider each term further.
Art versus artifact
The word “art” is derived from the Latin ars, which originally meant “skill” or “craft.” These meanings are still primary in other English words derived from ars, such as “artifact” (a thing made by human skill) and “artisan” (a person skilled at making things). The meanings of “art” and “artist,” however, are not so straightforward. We understand art as involving more than just skilled craftsmanship. What exactly distinguishes a work of art from an artifact, or an artist from an artisan?
When asked this question, students typically come up with several ideas. One is beauty. Much art is visually striking, and in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, the analysis of aesthetic qualities was indeed central in art history. During this time, art that imitated ancient Greek and Roman art (the art of classical antiquity), was considered to embody a timeless perfection. Art historians focused on the so-called fine arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture—analyzing the virtues of their forms. Over the past century and a half, however, both art and art history have evolved radically.
Artists turned away from the classical tradition, embracing new media and aesthetic ideals, and art historians shifted their focus from the analysis of art’s formal beauty to interpretation of its cultural meaning. Today we understand beauty as subjective—a cultural construct that varies across time and space. While most art continues to be primarily visual, and visual analysis is still a fundamental tool used by art historians, beauty itself is no longer considered an essential attribute of art.
A second common answer to the question of what distinguishes art emphasizes originality, creativity, and imagination. This reflects a modern understanding of art as a manifestation of the ingenuity of the artist. This idea, however, originated five hundred years ago in Renaissance Europe, and is not directly applicable to many of the works studied by art historians. For example, in the case of ancient Egyptian art or Byzantine icons, the preservation of tradition was more valued than innovation. While the idea of ingenuity is certainly important in the history of art, it is not a universal attribute of the works studied by art historians.
All this might lead one to conclude that definitions of art, like those of beauty, are subjective and unstable. One solution to this dilemma is to propose that art is distinguished primarily by its visual agency, that is, by its ability to captivate viewers. Artifacts may be interesting, but art, I suggest, has the potential to move us—emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise. It may do this through its visual characteristics (scale, composition, color, etc.), expression of ideas, craftsmanship, ingenuity, rarity, or some combination of these or other qualities. How art engages varies, but in some manner, art takes us beyond the everyday and ordinary experience. The greatest examples attest to the extremes of human ambition, skill, imagination, perception, and feeling. As such, art prompts us to reflect on fundamental aspects of what it is to be human. Any artifact, as a product of human skill, might provide insight into the human condition. But art, in moving beyond the commonplace, has the potential to do so in more profound ways. Art, then, is perhaps best understood as a special class of artifact, exceptional in its ability to make us think and feel through visual experience.
History: Making Sense of the Past
Like definitions of art and beauty, ideas about history have changed over time. It might seem that writing history should be straightforward—it’s all based on facts, isn’t it? In theory, yes, but the evidence surviving from the past is vast, fragmentary, and messy. Historians must make decisions about what to include and exclude, how to organize the material, and what to say about it. In doing so, they create narratives that explain the past in ways that make sense in the present. Inevitably, as the present changes, these narratives are updated, rewritten, or discarded altogether and replaced with new ones. All history, then, is subjective—as much a product of the time and place it was written as of the evidence from the past that it interprets.
The discipline of art history developed in Europe during the colonial period (roughly the 15th to the mid-20th century). Early art historians emphasized the European tradition, celebrating its Greek and Roman origins and the ideals of academic art. By the mid-20th century, a standard narrative for “Western art” was established that traced its development from the prehistoric, ancient, and medieval Mediterranean to modern Europe and the United States. Art from the rest of the world, labeled “non-Western art,” was typically treated only marginally and from a colonialist perspective.
The immense sociocultural changes that took place in the 20th century led art historians to amend these narratives. Accounts of Western art that once featured only white males were revised to include artists of color and women. The traditional focus on painting, sculpture, and architecture was expanded to include so-called minor arts such as ceramics and textiles and contemporary media such as video and performance art. Interest in non-Western art increased, accelerating dramatically in recent years.
Today, the biggest social development facing art history is globalism. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, familiarity with different cultures and facility with diversity are essential. Art history, as the story of exceptional artifacts from a broad range of cultures, has a role to play in developing these skills. Now art historians ponder and debate how to reconcile the discipline’s European intellectual origins and its problematic colonialist legacy with contemporary multiculturalism and how to write art history in a global era.
Smarthistory’s videos and articles reflect this history of art history. Since the site was originally created to support a course in Western art and history, the content initially focused on the most celebrated works of the Western canon. With the key periods and civilizations of this tradition now well-represented and a growing number of scholars contributing, the range of objects and topics has increased in recent years. Most importantly, substantial coverage of world traditions outside the West has been added. As the site continues to expand, the works and perspectives presented will evolve in step with contemporary trends in art history. In fact, as innovators in the use of digital media and the internet to create, disseminate, and interrogate art historical knowledge, Smarthistory and its users have the potential to help shape the future of the discipline.
Additional resources
“Introduction: Learning to look and think critically,” a chapter in Reframing Art History (our free art history textbook).
“Introduction: Close looking and approaches to art,” a chapter in Reframing Art History (our free art history textbook)—especially useful for materials related to formal (visual) analysis.
Smarthistory, “Art history and world art history,” in Smarthistory, January 12, 2021, accessed August 19, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/world-art-history/.
Check out all the chapters on world art in Reframing Art History.
Source: Dr. Robert Glass, “What is art history and where is it going?,” in Smarthistory, October 28, 2017, accessed August 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/what-is-art-history/.
Introduction to art historical analysis
Why does a work of art look the way it does? Who made it and why? What does it mean? These questions and others like them lie at the heart of art historical inquiry. Art historians use various types of analysis to provide answers. These have varied over time and continue to evolve, but in general, three categories can be distinguished. In the essays and videos on Smarthistory, different types of analysis are used, often without identifying them explicitly. If you become familiar with the three categories below, you will be able to recognize them.
Art as physical object
Oil and pigments on canvas, carved marble, woven fibers, a concrete dome—most works of art and architecture are physical things. As such, a fundamental determinant of the way they look is the material of which they are made. In architecture, the word used for this is simply materials. In art, the term medium (plural: media) is also used.
Materials have specific properties that dictate the ways they can be manipulated and the effects they can produce. For example, marble will crack under its own weight if not properly balanced and supported, which imposes limits on the sculptural forms or architectural designs that can be created with it. Fresco painting, stained glass, and mosaic are all capable of creating breathtaking images, but their visual qualities differ significantly due to the distinct physical properties and working methods of each medium. This latter aspect—the way a medium is worked or used—is called technique. Together, materials and technique determine basic visual features and the parameters within which an artist or architect must work.
Learning to recognize specific media and techniques and how they have been used historically are fundamental art historical skills. Not only do they allow you to understand the logic behind specific visual qualities, but they may also help identify when and where a work was made since certain media and techniques are characteristic of specific periods and places.
Conservation
Technological advances have led to new methods of analyzing materials and techniques. Today this research is carried out primarily by art conservators. Because art and architecture, like all physical things, are subject to the corrosive effects of time and environment, conservation science is a crucial field. Training in art conservation typically involves coursework in chemistry as well as the practice and history of art.
While the main job of conservators is preservation, their investigative techniques can also benefit art historians. Technologies such as X-radiography, ultraviolet illumination, and infrared reflectography can reveal features of an object invisible to the human eye, such as the inside of a bronze statue, changes made to a painting, or drawing under a painted surface. X-ray fluorescence can identify the pigments in paint or the composition of metals by their chemical profiles. Dendrochronology can establish the earliest date a wooden object could have been made based on tree ring growth patterns. Analysis of materials and techniques using methods such as these can help art historians answer questions about when, where, how, or by whom, a work was made.
Art as visual experience
Most art is visually compelling. While materials and technique determine the range of what is possible, the final appearance of a work is the product of numerous additional choices made by the artist. An artist painting a portrait of a woman in oil on canvas must decide on the size and shape of the canvas, the scale of the woman and where to place her, and the types of forms, lines, colors, and brushstrokes to use in representing the sitter and her surroundings. In a compelling work of art, myriad variables such as these and others come together to create an engaging visual experience.
Visual (formal) analysis
Art historians use visual analysis to describe and understand this experience. Often called formal analysis because it focuses on form rather than subject matter or historical context, this typically consists of two parts: description of the visual features of a work and analysis of their effects. To describe visual properties systematically, art historians rely on an established set of terms and concepts. These include characteristics such as format, scale, composition, and viewpoint; treatment of the human figure and space; and the use of form, line, color, light, and texture.
In describing visual qualities, formal analysis usually identifies certain features as contributing to the overall impression of the work. For example, a prominent linear form might suggest strength if straight and vertical, grace or sensuality if sinuous, or stability and calm if long and horizontal. Sharp contrasts in light and dark may make an image feel bold and dramatic whereas subdued lighting might suggest gentleness or intimacy. In the past, formal analysis assumed there was some elementary level of universality in the human response to visual form and tried to describe these effects. Today, the method is understood as more subjective, but still valued as a critical exercise and means of analyzing visual experience, especially in introductory art history courses.
Style
Formal analysis is a powerful tool for appreciating art. Armed with it, you can analyze any work based simply on the experience of looking at it. But the method is also important for understanding art in its historical context. This is because the visual properties of works made by an individual artist or, more generally, by artists working in the same time and place, typically have common features. Art historians call these shared characteristics style. As art historian James Elkins elegantly phrased it, style is “a coherence of qualities in periods or people.” [1] This may include consistency in things like medium, function, and subject matter, but when art historians use the term style, they primarily mean formal characteristics.
Style varies by time and place, so like medium and technique, it can be used to determine the origin of a work of art. Because of its complexity, style is a far more specific indicator than materials and technique alone. Early art historians used stylistic analysis to categorize the vast legacy of undocumented art, assigning works to cultures, artistic circles, or individual artists based on their formal qualities. Today, stylistic analysis continues to be used to establish origins when unknown works are discovered or previous attributions revised.
In addition to helping categorize individual works, style has shaped the narratives told by art historians in fundamental ways. Until the mid-20th century, most histories of art focused on tracing stylistic development and change. As a result, many of the period divisions traditionally used for Western art are based on style. Some examples are Geometric, Orientalizing, Archaic, and Classical in ancient Greece, Romanesque and Gothic in Medieval Europe, and the Early, High, and Late Renaissance. Today style is only one of many aspects of art that interest art historians, but the power of tradition has ensured that style-based period divisions and labels remain widely used. Likewise, familiarity with the style of specific periods, places, and artists is still considered fundamental art historical knowledge and often remains the focus of introductory art history textbooks and courses.
Art as cultural artifact
While understanding the physical properties and visual experience of art is important, today most art historical research focuses on the significance of works as cultural artifacts. This category of analysis is characterized by a variety of approaches, but all share the basic objective of examining art in relation to its historical context. Most often, this is the time and place in which a work was created—typically we want to know why and by whom it was made and how it originally functioned. But since works of art and architecture often survive for centuries, art historians may also study a work’s cultural significance at later historical moments.
Subject matter / iconography
One of the most basic types of contextual analysis is the interpretation of subject matter. Much art is representational (i.e., it creates a likeness of something), and naturally we want to understand what is shown and why. Art historians call the subject matter of images iconography. Iconographic analysis is the interpretation of its meaning. In many cases, such as an image of the crucified Christ or seated Buddha, identifying the subject presents few problems. When the iconography is obscure or treated in an unusual way, art historians try to understand it by studying the historical context in which the image was made, typically through comparison with texts and other imagery from the time. With challenging images, scholars may disagree on which contextual materials are relevant, resulting in conflicting interpretations. For many complex or enigmatic works, the meanings of the subject matter continue to be debated and reinterpreted today.
Function
Another common aspect of art investigated through contextual analysis is function. Historically, many works of art and nearly all architecture were intended to serve some purpose beyond the aesthetic. Understanding function is crucial because it usually plays a role in determining many features, including iconography, materials, format, and aspects of style. At the most basic level, art historians analyze function by identifying types—an altarpiece, portrait, Book of Hours, tomb, palace, etc. Studying the history and use of a given type provides a context for understanding specific examples.
Analysis of function becomes more complex when the personal motivations of the people responsible for making a work are considered. For much of history, this includes not only artists but also the patrons who commissioned works and in some cases, advisors acting on the patron’s behalf. When such agents can be identified, definitively or hypothetically, their motivations become potential contexts for understanding purpose and appearance.
With complex works, this can soon raise interpretive quandaries. Take, for example, Michelangelo’s famous frescos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Are these highly original paintings best understood in relation to the function of the chapel (a key ritual site in the Vatican palace), or the concerns of the painter, Michelangelo, or of the patron, Pope Julius II, or of one or more of the Julius’s advisors at the papal court? The answer is likely some combination of these, but the contextual materials relevant to each are so vast and diverse that there is no one way to interpret them.
Thinking critically
This raises a final point about analyzing the meaning of art and architecture as cultural artifacts. While art historians rely on facts as much as possible and seek to interpret works in ways that are historically plausible, we recognize that subjectivity is inescapable. As discussed in “What is art history?,” we interpret the past in ways that make sense in the present. Today, art historians continue to ask traditional questions like those noted above, but they also ask new ones inspired by social developments such as feminism, globalism, multiculturalism, and identity politics.
So, as you read, watch, and listen, try to recognize the approaches being used and to think critically about them. Is the speaker or writer talking about the work as a physical object, visual experience, or cultural artifact? (Often it will be some combination.) What contexts are being used to explain meaning? Which contexts are not considered? This may leave you with as many questions as answers, but that is good. You are here not only to gain knowledge, but also to develop a curiosity about the world and the ability to think critically about it.
Source: Dr. Robert Glass, “Introduction to art historical analysis,” in Smarthistory, October 28, 2017, accessed August 19, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/introduction-to-art-historical-analysis/.
Cite this article as: Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, “Introduction: Learning to look and think critically,” in Reframing Art History, Smarthistory, January 11, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/reframing-art-history/introduction-learning-to-look/.
