Every piece of art tells a story. Usually, more than one. I’ll show you.
This is a biombo, a folding screen made in Mexico and inspired by Japanese decorative designs. It existed before we had pianos or bicycles or even sandwiches. This one would have decorated a wealthy Spaniard’s home in late seventeenth-century Mexico.
And while it might look like mere decoration, if you lean in, it'll tell you a story. A story of a battle, where Spain conquered Tenochtitlan, or modern day Mexico City, and the Aztec emperor Moctezuma the Second was killed by one of his own subjects. But records from the Indigenous people of Mexico tell a different story of the same event.
In their account, the Spanish killed the Aztec emperor, as part of their conquest. Historical events like this — and history itself — aren’t exactly straightforward. The story you get varies, depending on which documents, or artworks, you look at, and who’s doing the telling.
By studying this centuries-old screen we learn about more than just the object itself. We learn about history — and how history, like art, is not something we discover, but something we create. Hi!
I'm Sarah Urist Green. I’m a curator and art educator, and this is Crash Course Art History. You might think that art history is a stuffy subject that’s only useful for clinching a trivia night victory.
Or you might think it’s just memorizing a bunch of names and dates, with the occasional jump-scare from a creepy, long-limbed baby. But art history is really about thinking critically by observing closely. It’s the study of objects and images to understand the people, places and time periods they come from.
Art reflects different perspectives and stories but also reveals the ideas that connect people across the world. And that three-letter word — “art” — holds some big ideas. It can include ancient cave paintings and pride flags, state-funded monuments and street art, works designed for function and works designed to ruffle feathers.
And since art is subjective, what’s a beautiful sculpture to one person, might be the stuff of nightmares to another. Plus, ideas about what art is have changed—and continue to change—over time. Not all cultures think of art the same way, or even have a word for “art” in their language.
Like, the Lega people from what’s now the Democratic Republic of the Congo have a category of objects called masengo, which roughly translates to “heavy things” and refers to items with great significance or “weight. ” As for you, when you hear “art history,” you might think of something like this. Whoops, sorry, I meant, this: The well-known Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni.
No clue why we call him by his first name. But let’s explore why that ceiling comes to mind when you think about art, and why you’ve heard of the guy who painted it. Let’s go to the drawing board!
The story of the Sistine Chapel doesn’t actually begin with Michelangelo, but with a wealthy Italian family called the Medicis. The Medicis ruled Florence and, later, Tuscany, from the 15th to the 18th centuries. They also controlled the what, where, and how of the local art scene.
They financially supported several huge artists—including Michelangelo. So with the Medici Brand behind him, Michelangelo was basically one of Italy’s biggest influencers. He even caught the eye of Pope Julius the Second, who commissioned him to paint the now famous Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Now, the Medicis were also sponsors of the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, who wrote a book called “Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. ” It celebrated Michelangelo and other artists like him, and it gave the Medicis credit for supporting a historic, quote, “rebirth. ” In fact, before the French term “Renaissance” became prominent in the 19th century, Vasari described this artistic moment in time as “rinascita”— Italian for “renewal” or “rebirth.
” So yeah, the book was basically sixteenth-century sponsored content, and it became the bedrock of what we know now as art history. It shaped not only the way art history would be written, but which artworks were considered important, talked about, and eventually meme-ified. Of course, writing about art didn’t start with Vasari.
By the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. E.
, Plato was wrestling with art’s imitation of reality in his writings, and Aristotle was exploring how art can conjure emotions. And in the ninth century, Zhang Yanyuan wrote “Famous Paintings of Successive Dynasties,” the oldest comprehensive written history of Chinese painting known to exist. So, there’s evidence of art historical writings throughout the world, and through much of recorded history.
But Vasari’s series of biographies strongly shaped how the story of art would be told from then on, with a significant bias toward Western European art. It was this text that became the basis of what is called the canon of art history: a collection or timeline of artists and artworks believed to be truly great, to have furthered art’s progress, that get talked about again and again. So, yeah, who's in the canon and who's out is pretty arbitrary!
And because this is my series — and I don't think Vasari's gonna mind — allow me to introduce. . .
. my canon cannon. With its help, I, according to my own whims, will launch people into my personal canon of beloved artists.
And you better watch out, Gauguin, I may also kick a few out, too. Many of Vasari’s chosen artists became known as the Old Masters, a kind of legendary status that later artists needed to measure up to. Over time, art history continued to evolve, and the canon of greats grew to include new masterpieces and makers, and forgot about others.
By the eighteenth century, artworks began to be sorted by style, or groupings based on time periods, creators, or elements of their appearance. With that sorting came new ways of judging, explaining, and interpreting art, through the field of art criticism. And by the mid-twentieth-century, race, class, and gender became recognized as important lenses through which to examine art, both in terms of who made it and who is looking at it.
So, today, art historians analyze images and materials from multiple angles to explore what they can tell us about each other, ourselves, and the cultures that connect us. Studying art helps us understand history as a constructed account, something that’s built in its telling. And it helps us remember that our own perspectives are always limited.
The more we learn about how other people see the world, the better we understand…pretty much everything. Like, here’s an artwork by Kara Walker, where one account of history confronts another. It’s called “Fons Americanus,”—“American Fountain” in Latin—and it’s inspired by the Victoria Memorial in London, a monument celebrating the British Empire under Queen Victoria.
The Victoria Memorial tells a triumphant story about colonial rule in Africa and the Americas. But Walker’s monument tells another part of the story from a different view. A weeping boy and a noose hanging from a tree, for example, give voice to the unspoken parts of the Victoria Memorial: the human toll of colonial violence and enslavement.
As Walker’s work shows us, it’s as important to think about what isn’t included in art as what is. And the same goes for history. So, yeah, let’s launch her right into the canon.
And often, what is remembered comes down to what materials have survived. Take this painting: “The Raft of the Medusa,” painted by Théodore Géricault in 1819. It’s a massive artwork that tells an even bigger story.
In 1816, a French ship set off for the coast of Senegal, captained by a pal of King Louis the 18th, who hadn’t been at sea in twenty years. The results were disastrous: the captain wrecked the ship, which didn’t have enough lifeboats, so the crew cobbled together a raft to carry the remaining passengers. About 150 people were set adrift on the makeshift vessel, and during the next thirteen days at sea, they fought, killed, and even resorted to cannibalism.
When rescue finally arrived, only fifteen survivors remained, with five more dying before ever seeing land. It took Géricault over a year to paint the scene, which we know from documents that have survived: sketches, drafts, and letters about his work. He interviewed survivors of the Medusa, drew their portraits, and consulted a book that two of them wrote about what happened.
And he wrestled with how to paint it, arranging the scene until he was satisfied with the story it would tell. We even know how the work was received by the public. At the time, opinions on the French monarchy ranged widely, so when Géricault depicted a tragedy caused by the king’s incompetent leadership, many interpreted that as a sick burn.
The point is: We know so much about this one painting because lots of material evidence about it has survived the past two hundred years. But that’s not the case for so many other works. Like this drum, which sits in the British Museum.
We don’t know exactly who made it or when. What little we know right now is from museum records, which say an Irish scientist procured the drum in Virginia in the early 18th century. The museum labeled it an American Indian drum made of a hollowed tree.
Then, over 150 years later, an anthropologist noticed it looked a lot like drums made in West Africa. But it took about seventy more years before researchers figured out the drum was made of wood from a West African species of tree. It’s likely that someone from the Akan culture, in what’s now Ghana, made the drum.
In its original context, it would have been played as part of a whole ensemble. But at some point, the drum probably ended up on a ship from Africa to North America. We have stacks of information to help us understand “The Raft of the Medusa.
” But with the drum, we’re piecing together a story from scraps. Artifacts like these show us how much what survives our history shapes our understanding of it. But the flip side is also true: the more we uncover what’s been lost, the more missing stories we fill in.
So, throughout this series, we’ll explore art history to discover how art reflects different perspectives — but also reveals unexpected connections across time, space, and culture. We’ll see how art-making is also meaning making. And how context can change everything we thought we knew.
We’ll raise juicy questions about how history is created and told, how cultures swap ideas and materials, how artists respond to social issues, and so much more. Next time, we’ll learn about exactly how to carefully look at a work of art — and uncover ideas beyond the surface. I’ll see you there.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History, which was filmed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these delightful people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
