INTRODUCTION

This is an attempt. An attempt to create an English version of my Art History Course (http://www.elccarignanhistoiredelart1ereannee.blogspot.fr/). I am waiting, I hope for corrections.

That history begins with the period of the Middle Ages and continues until the contemporary period. The principles are :

1. to show that there is coherency in the successive artistic periods (that history has a sense : a direction and a meaning),

2. to prepare our mind for contemporary art,  starting with the Middle Ages.

1. The changes, e.g., from the Roman period to the Gothic period, from the Gothic period to the Renaissance, or the Baroque period to the New Classicism period, are not arbitrary. Each period is a continuation of the previous one but its definition however lies in its opposition to it. Art history is both continuity and rupture.

2. The period of the Middle Ages is as unfamiliar to us as the contemporary age for questions of art. But we are not conscious of this. Because we believe that we know, that we immediately understand the works of the Middle Ages. That belief is (generally) mistaken. It's an illusion. In other words, we have to make the same effort to understand art from the Middle Ages as we do to understand contemporary art..

This is why that history of art starts in the 12th century.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS (links)

Chapter 1 : Romanesque architecture
Chapter 2 : Romanesque sculpture
Chapter 3 : Gothic architecture
Chapter 4 : Gothic sculpture
Chapter 5 : International Gothic and The Renaissance in the North in the 15th century (or : the Flemish Primitives) 
Chapter 6 : The Renaissance in Italy : The perspective

to follow :


Chapter 7 : The Renaissance in Italy. The classical Renaissance : 14th and 15th centuries.
Chapter 8 : One of the Renaissance artists : Leonard de Vinci
Chapter 9 : The painters of the classical Renaissance (14th-15th centuries)
Chapter 10 : The Mannerist Italian Renaissance (16th century)
Chapter 11 : The artists of the Mannerist Italian Renaissance (16th century)