Arts & Culture
Image-making across media and centuries, plus the theory used to argue about it.
10 fields · 108 topics · 189 curated works
The core practices and their techniques.
Foundations & Overviews · Drawing Fundamentals · Perspective · Anatomy for Artists · Composition
Art that occupies space rather than depicting it — from carving and casting to assemblage, installation and land art.
Foundations & Overviews · Carving · Modelling & Casting · Bronze Casting · Assemblage
Reproducible images, historically the first mass media.
Foundations & Overviews · Woodcut · Engraving · Etching · Lithography
Art from the first marks on cave walls to the Romanesque — the long foundation every later tradition argues with.
Foundations & Overviews · Prehistoric Art · Egyptian Art · Greek & Roman Art · Byzantine Art
The period most people mean by 'art history'.
Foundations & Overviews · Early Renaissance · High Renaissance · Leonardo, Michelangelo & Raphael · Northern Renaissance Painting
From the break with representation onward.
Foundations & Overviews · Fauvism & Expressionism · Cubism · Futurism · Dada
The majority of the world's art, usually under-taught.
Foundations & Overviews · Chinese Painting & Calligraphy · Japanese Art · Indian Art · African Art
How images work and what they do — iconography, semiotics, the gaze, and the questions of authenticity that follow them.
Foundations & Overviews · Iconography & Iconology · Semiotics of the Image · Ways of Seeing · The Gaze
The medium that changed what painting was for.
Foundations & Overviews · Camera Fundamentals · Exposure & Light · Composition in Photography · Documentary Photography
Art whose material is computation — generative and algorithmic work, video and interactive installation, and AI image-making.
Foundations & Overviews · Digital Painting · 3D Art & Modelling · Generative & Algorithmic Art · Motion Graphics
No prior grounding assumed.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
Benvenuto Cellini · 1728
A firsthand account of Mannerist craft and ambition — casting the Perseus, working under Medici and French royal patronage — that shows the…
+30 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
Giorgio Vasari · 1550
The founding text of art history, arguing Italian art improved steadily from Cimabue to Michelangelo because each artist solved problems the last had…
+86 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture
Benvenuto Cellini · 1568
A working goldsmith and sculptor's first-hand account of bronze and gold casting, including the celebrated Perseus commission, against workshop…
+70 more at this level
12 of 189 works
Benvenuto Cellini
A firsthand account of Mannerist craft and ambition — casting the Perseus, working under Medici and French royal patronage — that shows the movement's self-conscious virtuosity and rivalry from inside the workshop.
about 12 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026William Henry Fox Talbot
The first book illustrated with photographs, arguing across its plates and captions that the camera records what is actually there — including details the eye would miss — and so gives evidence a different status from a drawing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Ruskin
Argues that learning to draw is really learning to see — that most beginners fail because they draw what they know a thing to be rather than the actual patch of colour and light in front of them.
about 5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026John Ruskin
Teaches linear perspective as a small set of geometric constructions any draughtsman can prove for themselves, arguing that most drawing manuals hide the reasoning and leave students copying rules they cannot check.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Lubbock
Argues Palaeolithic cave art and tool technology are evidence of a coherent early human culture, establishing the stage-based framework — Palaeolithic, Neolithic — still used to periodise prehistoric art.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Walter Crane
Argues illustration should work with the flat page and typography rather than imitate the illusion of a painting, drawing on his own Arts and Crafts book design.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Arthur Wesley Dow
Treats picture-making as the deliberate arrangement of line, mass and colour rather than accurate representation, and built a teaching method on that claim.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Édouard Lantéri
Teaches figure modelling as a sequence of observed structural decisions -- skeleton, masses, planes -- arguing a sculptor must build a figure from the body's inner logic outward rather than copying its surface.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Okakura Kakuzō
Argues Japan is the living museum of a single continuous Asian civilisation that it preserved and synthesised rather than merely imitated, a claim advanced by a Japanese curator explicitly against Western accounts of Japan as a derivative culture.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Camille Mauclair
A sympathetic contemporary survey introducing Manet, Monet, Degas and Renoir as a coherent movement united by the direct notation of light rather than academic finish.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John H. Vanderpoel
Teaches figure drawing through repeated comparative studies of proportion across many posed models rather than a single idealised canon, arguing accurate proportion is learned by comparison, not by memorising a formula.
link checked 17 Sept 2026S. L. Bensusan
Argues Rubens's career shows a clear developmental arc — his early, sometimes coarse and violent subjects reflect artistic immaturity rather than a flawed character — and that his late command of colour is what actually justifies his reputation as a master.
about 35 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026