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Masaryk University
Faculty of Arts
Department of Art History
Spring Semester 2024
Image, Object, Text: Theories and Methods in Art History and Visual Studies
Code: Credits: 8
COURSE OUTLINE
SYNOPSIS
This course looks at the methods and theoretical underpinning of contemporary practices of art
historical and visual cultural analysis. Based on examination of ideas and the close reading of key
scholarly texts, the course will engage both with traditional art historical methods as well as more
recent approaches to the study of art and visual culture.
The course will consider how conceptual frameworks inform the analysis of specific works of art and
architecture. It also considers how they determine the kinds of questions that are asked of them. You
will be asked to consider the relevance and application of these methods to a range of examples,
including the potential topics your final thesis.
Practical Information
The course co-ordinator is Prof. Matthew Rampley.
All queries concerning the organization of the course are to be directed to me. I can be contacted
either by email: rampley@muni.cz or directly at my office in L62 the Faculty of Arts Building (on Veveří
28).
The course will be taught in English.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
On successful completion of this module, you should be able to:
• Demonstrate a critical knowledge and understanding of historiographic methods relevant to the
study of art history and visual culture
• Demonstrate a critical knowledge and understanding of the ideas of key historians and theorists
of art, architecture and visual culture
• Identify, analysis and evaluate methods used in selected texts on the history of art and visual
culture
• Apply a variety of relevant analytical methods to the interpretation of works of art and visual
culture
• Exhibit advanced writing and oral skills
HOW THE COURSE WILL BE TAUGHT
In keeping with the University policy, the course will be taught in-person.
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MODULE SCHEDULE
The course will be taught on the following days:
29 February
12.00 – 14.30 Observing art: facts, meaning, theory
7 March
12.00 – 13.50 Style and form
14 March
12.00 – 14.30 The social history of art
21 March
12.00 – 13.50 The idea of historical periods in art
4 April
12.00 – 13.50 Concepts of iconology
11 April
12.00 – 14.30 Canon wars: the values and objects of art history
25 April
12.00 – 14.30 Associative and horizontal art histories
2 May
12.00 – 13.50 The gaze: sexuality and the nude
9 May
12.00 – 14.30 Across cultures: world art history and the debate over decolonization
The sessions will take place in room L21 in the Faculty of Arts Building on Veveří 28. Each session will
consist of an informal lecture / discussion. In addition, all students will be required to give a short (15minute)
oral presentation on a topic.
You will receive informal written feedback on your presentation. This will not contribute towards the
overall mark for this course. It is merely meant to help you to identify strengths and weaknesses you
may need to address in preparation for the formal assessment.
ASSESSMENT AND ASSESSMENT CRITERIA
The course will be assessed on the basis of a 20-minute oral presentation, followed by a 10-minute
discussion, on a single artwork on display in the Moravian Gallery, the Dům umění or another gallery or
museum in Brno. It may also be a significant work of architecture or of public art in Brno.
Your presentation should look at your chosen example in the light of one or more of the ideas,
methods and theories you have studied during the course. You should be able to explain the reasons
for your decision to use that particular method and explain how it shapes our understanding of the
object in question. You will be expected to make relevant comparisons with other works of art and also
to refer to relevant works of scholarship and critical commentary.
You will give your presentation in front of the work on display. At the end of your presentation, you will
be asked to submit any notes you have been using. Your notes should include a bibliography of the
research sources you have used for your presentation.
I shall also schedule a 1-to-1 consultation tutorial with each of you to discuss your ideas for the
presentation. The provisional timetable is set out as follows:
10 & 16 May Consultation tutorials (time to be agreed)
30 & 31 May Assessed presentations
6 June Assessed presentations
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The presentation will be assessed on the basis of the following criteria:
1. Research: is the presentation well researched and are its claims based on appropriate use of
sources?
2. Understanding: does the presentation display a good level of understanding of the materials /
ideas it discusses?
3. Analysis: does the presentation undertake an appropriate critical analysis of source material?
4. Argument: does the presentation present a clearly constructed argument, with a conclusion?
5. Relevance: are the material and the arguments used relevant to the work in question?
6. Language: is the presentation in clear and correct English?
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GENERAL READING
The following reading list includes books and articles that will be discussed in the individual sessions as
well as general, background, reading. The reading for each session includes key reading that you will
be expected to have prepared before the session. You are not expected to have read all the items
listed for each session. Equally, it is expected that for your assessed essay, you will undertake your own
research and reading beyond what is listed in this bibliography.
Please note: as far as is practical, all items will be available on the Learning Materials folder of the
Faculty intranet.
You can find the link here.
GENERAL READING
You should find the following general books useful as an introduction to the topic. There are copies in
the library.
• Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art history: a critical introduction to its methods (Manchester,
2006)
• Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical terms for art history (Chicago, 2003).
• Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art (London, 2018)
READING FOR INDIVIDUAL SESSIONS
1. OBSERVING ART: FACTS, MEANING, THEORY
Key Reading
• Paul Barolsky, ‘Art History as Fiction,’ Artibus et Historiae 17.34 (1996) pp. 9-17.
Recommended Reading
• Paul Barolsky, ‘Art History and Positivism,’ Source: Notes in the History of Art 18.1 (1998) pp.
27-30.
• James Elkins, ‘On Monstrously Ambiguous Paintings,’ History and Theory 32.3 (1993) pp. 227-
47.
• David Freedberg et al, ‘The Object of Art History,’ Art Bulletin 76.3 (1994) pp. 394-410.
• Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ in Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973) pp. 3-32.
• Barbara Larson, ‘Positivism and the Early Chairs of Art History in Europe, 1860-1880,’ in
Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines (London, 2019) pp. 71-89.
• Sam Rose, ‘Close Looking and Conviction,’ Art History 40.1 (2016) pp. 156-77.
• Moriz Thausing, ‘The Status of Art History as an Academic Discipline’ in Journal of Art
Historiography 1 (2009). You should also read the introduction by Karl Johns.
2. STYLE AND FORMAL ANALYSIS
Key Reading
• Schneider Adams, Laurie, ‘Formalism and Style’ in Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art
(London, 2009) pp. 21-42.
• Andrea Pinotti, ‘Formalism and the History of Style’ in M. Rampley et al, eds., Art History and
Visual Studies in Europe (Leiden, 2012) pp. 75-90.
Recommended Reading
• Robert Bagley, ‘Style,’ in Max Loehr and the Study of Chinese Bronzes (Ithaca, 2008) pp. 121-29.
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• Noel Carroll, ‘Art and Form’ in Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction (London, 1999)
pp. 107-54.
• Alois Riegl, ‘Late Roman Art Industry’ in Eric Fernie, ed., Art History and its Methods (London,
1995) pp. 116-126. Available online here.
• Meyer Schapiro, ‘Style’ in Alfred Kroeber, ed., Anthropology Today (Chicago, 1953) pp. 287-
311.
• Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Introduction’ to Wölfflin, The Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger
(New York, 1950) pp. 1-17. Available online here.
• Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘The New Pictorial Form’ in Wölfflin, Classic Art, trans. Peter & Linda Murray
(London, 1980) pp. 251-286. Available online here.
3. THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF ART
Key Reading
• Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (London, 1993). See especially ‘Social Structure and
Artistic Creativity’ (pp. 9-25) and ‘The Social Production of Art’ (pp. 26-48)
Recommended Reading
• Frederick Antal, ‘Introduction’ in Antal, Florentine Painting and its Social Background (London,
1947) pp. 1-9.
• T. J. Clark, ‘On the Social History of Art,’ in Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848
Revolution (London, 1973) pp. 9-20.
• Craig Clunas, ‘The Social History of Art,’ in Robert Nelson and Richard Schiff, eds, Critical Terms
for Art History (Chicago 2003) pp. 465-78.
• Jürgen Habermas, ‘Art Criticism and the Institutions of the Public Sphere’ in Jeremy Tanner, ed.,
The Sociology of Art (London, 2003) pp. 157-163.
Case Studies
• Michael Baxandall, ‘The Period Eye,’ in Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century
Italy : a Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1988) pp. 29-57.
• Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’ in Crow, Modern Art in the
Common Culture (London, 1996) pp. 3-38.
• Erika Szivos, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Budapest as a Centre of Art,’ East Central Europe 33.1-2 (2006) pp.
141-169.
• Robert Witkin, ‘Van Eyck through the Looking Glass’ in Jeremy Tanner, ed., The Sociology of Art
(London, 2003) pp. 221-232.
4. TIME & CHANGE: HISTORICAL PERIODS IN ART
Key Reading
• Lisa A. Reilly, ‘Change over Time: Neatline and the Study of Architectural History,’ Artl@s
Bulletin 4.1 (2015) pp. 7-19.
Recommended Reading
• Marshall Brown, ‘Periods and Resistances,’ Modern Language Quarterly 62.4 (2001) pp. 309-16
• Peter Burke, ‘Western Historical Thinking in a Global Perspective – 10 Theses’ in Jörn Rüsen,
ed., Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate (New York, 2002) pp. 15-30.
• Dan Karlholm and Keith Moxey, eds, Time in the History of Art (London, 2018). Available here.
• Eva Kernbauer, ‘Art as Historiography’ in Kernbauer, Art, History and Anachronic Interventions
since 1990 (London, 2022) pp. 27-49. Available online here.
• Erwin Panofsky, Erwin, ‘Reflections on Historical Time,’ trans. Johanna Bauman. Critical Inquiry
30 no. 4 (2001) pp. 691-701
• Matthew Rampley, ‘Linear, Entangled, Anachronic: Periodization and the Shapes of Time in Art
History,’ in Shona Kallestrup, Magdalena Kunińska, Mihnea Alexandru Mihail, Anna
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Adashinskaya and Cosmin Minea, eds, Periodization in the Art Historiographies of Central and
Eastern Europe (London, 2022) pp. 14-27. (Available online here).
5. CONCEPTS OF ICONOLOGY
Key Reading
• Erwin Panofsky, ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art,’
in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth, 1955) pp. 51-81.
Case Studies
• Areti Adamopoulou, ‘The Column and the Pediment: the Persistence of Values?’ in Artl@as
Bulletin 12.1 (2023) pp. 11-24.
• Dolores Mitchell, ‘The Iconology of Smoking in Turn-of-the-Century Art,’ Source: Notes in the
History of Art 6.3 (1987) pp. 27-33.
Recommended Reading
• Peter Burke, ‘Iconography,’ in Burke, The Italian Renaissance (Oxford 2014) pp. 171-85.
• Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The art of not describing: Vermeer - the detail and the patch,’ History
of the Human Sciences 2.2 (1989) pp. 135-69.
• Creighton Gilbert, ‘On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,’ Art Bulletin 34.3
(1952) pp. 202-16.
• Keith Moxey, ‘Panofsky’s Concept of Iconology and the Problem of Interpretation in the History
of Art,’ New Literary History 17.2 (1986) pp. 265-74.
• Erwin Panofsky, ‘Reality and Symbol in Early Flemish Painting,’ in Panofsky, Early Netherlandish
Painting, its Origins and Character (New York, 1966) pp. 131-48
6. CANON WARS: THE OBJECTS AND VALUES OF ART HISTORY
Key Reading
• Hubert Locher, ‘The Idea of the Canon and Canon Formation in Art History’ in M. Rampley, eds,
Art History and Visual Studies in Europe (Leiden, 2012) pp. 29-40
• Linda Nochlin, ’Why have there been no great women artists?’ in Women, Art and Power
(London: 2018) pp. 145-78.
Recommended Reading
• Karen Edis Barzman, ‘Beyond the Canon: Feminists, Postmodernism and the History of Art,’ in
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52.3 (1994) pp. 327-39.
• Whitney Chadwick, ‘Art History and the Woman Artist,’ in Chadwick, Women, Art and Society
(London, 2020) pp. 19-44.
• Victor Ginsburgh and Sheila Weyers, ‘On the Formation of Canons: The Dynamics of Narratives
in Art History,’ Empirical Studies of the Arts 28.1 (2010) pp. 37-72.
• Joseph Leo Koerner and Lisbet Rausing, ‘Value,’ in Robert Nelson and Richard Schiff, eds, Critical
Terms for Art History (Chicago 2003) pp. 419-34.
• Griselda Pollock, ‘Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts,’ in Old Mistresses: Women, Art
and Ideology (London, 2013) pp. 50-81.
7. HORIZONTAL AND ASSOCIATIVE ART HISTORIES
Key Reading
• Tomáš Pospiszyl, ‘Eastern and Western Cubes: Minimalism in Dispute’ in Pospiszyl, An
Associative Art History (Prague, 2017) pp. 90-109.
• Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Towards a Horizontal Art History of the European Avant-Garde’ in Sascha Bru
et al, eds, Europa Europa: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent (Berlin,
2009) pp. 49-58.
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Further Reading
• Enrico Castelnuovo, Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Symbolic Domination and Artistic Geography in Italian Art
History,’ in Art in Translation 1.1 (2015) pp. 5-48.
• Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, ‘Peripheral Circulations, Transient Centralities: The International
Geography of the Avant-Gardes in the Interwar Period (1918-1940)’ Visual Resources 35 (2019)
pp. 295-322.
• Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann, ‘The Challenge of Central Europe to the Historiography of Art’ in
Maske u. Kothurn 48.1-4 (2002) pp. 19-28.
• Claudia Mattos, ‘Whither Art History: Geography, Art Theory and New Perspectives for an
Inclusive Art History,’ Art Bulletin 96.3 (2014) pp. 259-64.
• Robert Nelson, ‘The Map of Art History,’ Art Bulletin 79.1 (1997) pp. 28-40
• Matthew Rampley, ‘Networks, Horizons, Centres and Hierarchies: On the Challenges of Writing
on Modernism in Central Europe,’ Umění 69.2 (2021) pp. 145-62.
• Photeini Vlachou, ‘Why Spatial? Time and the Periphery,’ Visual Resources 32 (2016) pp. 9-24
8. THE GAZE, SEXUALITY AND THE NUDE
Key Reading
• Margaret Olin, ‘Gaze,’ in Robert Nelson and Richard Schiff, eds, Critical Terms for Art History
(Chicago, 2003) pp. 318-29
Further Reading
• Sir Kenneth Clarke, ‘The Naked and the Nude,’ in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Princeton,
1990) pp. 3-29.
• Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Matthews, ‘The Feminist Critique of Art History,’ The Art
Bulletin 69.3 (1987) pp. 326-57
• Helen MacDonald, ‘Feminism, Ambiguity and the Ideal,’ Erotic Ambiguities: the Female Nude in
Art (London, 2000) pp. 7-30.
• Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art. Obscenity and Sexuality (London, 1992).
• Griselda Pollock, ‘Feminist Interventions in the Histories of Art,’ in Pollock, Vision and
Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London, 2003) pp. 37-60.
• Tereza Balducci, ‘Gazing Women,’ in Gender, Space and the Gaze in Post-Haussmann Visual
Culture (London, 2017) pp. 63-110.
• Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16.3 (1975) pp. 6-18.
9. ACROSS CULTURES: WORLD ART HISTORY AND THE DEBATE OVER
DECOLONIZATION
Key Reading
• James Elkins, ‘Non-European Stories,’ in Elkins, Stories of Art (London, 2002) pp. 89-115.
Further Reading – Theories and Debates
• Denis Dutton, ‘ “But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art”,’ in Noel Carroll, ed., Theories of Art
Today (Madison, 2000) pp. 217-240.
• James Elkins, ‘Canon and Globalization in Art History,’ in Anna Brzyski, ed., Partisan Canons
(Durham, NC, 2007) pp. 55-78.
• Ladislav Kesner, ‘Is a Truly Global Art History Possible?’ in James Elkins, ed., Is Art History
Global? (London, 2006) pp. 81-111.
• Maria Lugones, ‘Towards a Decolonial Feminism,’ in Hypatia 25.4 (2010) pp. 742-59.
• Walter Mignolo, ‘What Does it Mean to Decolonize?’ and ‘The Conceptual Triad’ in Mignolo
and Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality Durham NC, 2018) pp. 105-34 and 135-76.
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Further Reading – Case Studies
• Rowland Abiodun, ‘Introduction: the Centrality of Africa in African Art Studies’ and ‘Yoruba
Aesthetics’ in Abiodun, Yoruba Art and Language (Cambridge, 2014) pp. 1-23 and 245-83.
• James Elkins, ‘A Brace of Comparisons’ in Elkins, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art
History (Hong Kong, 2010) pp. 40-75.
• Partha Mitter, ‘Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,’
Art Bulletin 90.4 (2008) pp. 531-48
• Matthew Rampley, ‘Decolonising Central Europe: Czech Art and the Question of Colonial
Innocence,’ in Visual Resources 37.1 (2021) pp. 1-30.
• Katrin Sieg, ‘Encasing Colonialism and Cosmopolitan Citizenship at the German History
Museum’ in Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum (Ann Arbor, 2021) pp.
67-86