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Evening Study Online

Dr Matthias Vollmer

��5 pre-recorded lectures with 5 Zoom seminars at 18:00, over 5 weeks from Wednesday 7 October – Wednesday 4 November 2026

��£245

Course Description

This course traces key arguments in art history and visual theory, asking three intertwined questions: How do images act? How does style emerge? How is meaning produced? We begin with G.W.F. Hegel’s Aesthetics, where art appears as “Geist” (spirit) in sensuous form, then turn to Heinrich Wölfflin, who re-anchors historical perception in formal binaries that shape an epoch’s way of seeing. Erwin Panofsky articulates a three-tiered method—pre-iconographic, iconographic, iconological—linking motif, symbol, and worldview. With Ernst Gombrich, perception and practice take the lead: “making and matching,” schema and correction, – this is style as problem-solving. Maurice Merleau-Ponty grounds image and vision phenomenologically in the “embodied chiasm of seer and seen” – the notion that subject and object of perception are not separate, but inextricably linked. Svetlana Alpers reframes Dutch painting as a descriptive visual culture that unsettles Italian narrative norms. Clement Greenberg codifies medium-specific formalism and painting’s self-critique, while Rosalind Krauss moves from medium to index and the “expanded field.” Francis Haskell ties taste, canon, and meaning to patronage, collecting, and institutions. The arc culminates with Horst Bredekamp’s “Bildakt”: images are described as agents within technical, social, and scientific assemblages.

While this course requires no pre-existing knowledge of art theory, a basic grounding in art history and an interest in philosophical concepts and the history of ideas will be beneficial.

N.B. In 2025 new VAT rules for online courses came into effect in the EU. This meant that we are now required to charge EU participants their local VAT rate.�� VAT-inclusive prices for EU students will be displayed at check-out.

��If you have any questions please email us at��short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk