Introduction

Welcome to Learning Premodern History through Art, an Open Educational Resource textbook!

Art is one of the most powerful tools that humans have for communicating, sharing information, and expressing ourselves, and it has been with us since the earliest days of humanity. Because of art’s deep antiquity, because of its power to communicate and to tell stories, and because art has always belonged to the people of every race, class, gender, and socioeconomic level of society, art is one of the best ways we have of learning about history. Art is also a place where we humans have always found joy, meaning, fulfillment, emotional awareness, and personal expression.

In Learning Premodern History through Art, you’ll be invited onto this chronological and geographical journey through our human family, using the language of color, symbol, image, iconography, media, materials, mood, and more! We will explore the question of why art? in more depth and detail in chapter 1.

Structure of this book

Learning Premodern History through Art takes readers on an interactive tour of our planet in time and space. This textbook is divided into 10 different geographical regions, each one focused on an era of premodern history in that region. Within each geographical region, you will be introduced to 5 artworks from that place.

Over the course of this textbook, you will encounter all different types of artworks, from painting to sculpture, from coins to red figure vases, from household objects to monumental buildings. We will also explore the question of what is art / which objects “count” as art / which objects do not “count” as art? in further detail in chapter 1. But you can expect to meet a wide variety of different types of art in this book.

Each piece of the 50 artworks in this book will be used to teach you, the reader, one seminal fact about the history of the time and place from which it comes. Our art pieces will unlock truths about our human past in terms of economics and trade, technological advancements and access to natural and other resources, the development of artistic styles and ideas, religion and ritual, lived experience and everyday life, gender and sexuality, and so much more. What we can learn about history from even a single piece of art is nearly unlimited. Therefore, this book is meant to be only an introduction—an appetizer to get you started on the great feast of learning about human history through art. You’ll learn techniques for “reading” art that you can take with you wherever you go, wherever you might encounter a piece of art. And art, as you will see, is everywhere.

In terms of learning how to “read” art, each piece will include a number of interactive questions designed to encourage you to look at and see the art more deeply, notice its details, begin to build a vocabulary of color theory, symbol, and iconography, analyze it historically, and—most importantly of all—respond to it emotionally. Art is emotion. Art is made by humans just like us, to communicate messages of emotional expression to other humans. You are invited here to allow art to speak to you across space and time.

All of the images of the art in this book come from the Open Access image resources of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thousands of high-quality images of art from the Met’s collection are freely available online under a Public Domain license for use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which means that anyone can freely copy, modify and distribute those art images, even for commercial purposes. (More about the Met’s Open Access policy can be found by clicking the link here; more about Creative Commons Zero can be found here.) This textbook is therefore closely connected with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website: each art will include a link to its image source on the museum website, where you can make the image bigger, zoom in, and, of course, explore and find your way to other pieces of art.

Because of all of the technological advancements of the past few decades, images of art from all time periods all over the world are now available to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and often completely free. Again, you are invited, once you have finished with this book, to explore more art on your own. You are also heartily invited to let your work in this textbook inspire you to visit a museum and see art in person! The Met was chosen deliberately for Saint Peter’s University students in Jersey City, NJ, just a short train ride away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the world’s best art museums.

Also in keeping with this book’s goal of sharing free, high-quality, and easily accessible resources about art and history, all of the sources and further reading in this book, offered for those who would like to go deeper and learn more about our art pieces, come from online educational resources that can either be accessed by anyone with internet access, or any Saint Peter’s (or other school!) student with access to the university’s library databases. Many of our sources and further reading come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s vast online library of resources for art and art history, written by experts in the field, and are freely available to anyone. The rest come from the Saint Peter’s University library databases, a resource available to any university community member. You’re invited to allow this integration of free, high-quality, academic research sources inspire you towards deeper learning and further research about art.

The book will open (in chapter 2, after we answer the question of why art? in chapter 1) with our quick guide to looking at art, a few tips, ideas, and principles to guide you in your journey of seeing, feeling, and understanding the language of art, no matter its time period or geographical region. At the end, after you have seen, “read,” and responded to 50 pieces of art along with this book’s guidance, the book will close with an invitation for you to create some questions for seeing, reading, and responding to art pieces on your own. Anyone can look at, understand, and feel with art.

Welcome to Learning Premodern History through Art, and enjoy!