Course finale
Attribution: name the era from the work
Ten works from the whole course in random order. Name the hall by the signs of the style, without peeking at the caption.
From the Parthenon to “Black Square”: almost three thousand years that add up to one story
What matters here more than names is something else: why each era looks the way it does, what it argues with, and how to tell it from its neighbor in a few seconds.
Every hall is built the same way: a main work you can zoom into, the signs of the style, a short story, a few more works, and three questions. One hall takes twenty to thirty minutes.
Click a hall to jump to it. A green check means the hall is completed. The thirteenth card leads to a separate hall, The Russian Line.
European art swings between two poles. Some eras look for rule and clarity, others for feeling and movement. Each new era most often argues with the one before it, so styles are easier to remember in pairs.
European art always had a capital, and it kept moving: from Athens to Rome, then to Constantinople, Paris, Florence, Bruges, back to Rome and Paris. Click “Show the route” or step through the dots: the red dot shows where the center is in that era.
Eras don’t follow one another like train cars. They inherit, argue, and come back to each other across centuries: Malevich answers the icon, Klimt answers Ravenna, Manet answers Titian. Click an era to keep only its connections, or a line to open a “before and after” pair of paintings.
Body, space, light, faith, and patron run through all twelve halls like subway lines. Pick a thread and read it top to bottom. The size of a station shows how much the theme matters to the era; a dotted line means the thread fades into the shadows.
Russia was part of this story all along, it just entered it in its own way. For nine centuries it learned from Europe: the icon from Byzantium, the Kremlin built by Italian masters, St. Petersburg Baroque. Then it walked side by side, and by the early 20th century it began to teach. The colored bar below is the whole story: gold on the left, red on the right.
Ten works from the whole course in random order. Name the hall by the signs of the style, without peeking at the caption.
With Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” In late September I spent a long time on that triptych, panel by panel and figure by figure, and it was interesting in itself. Then came Bruegel, who started out as a Bosch imitator, then Manet and Klimt, and next up is van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Every time it came out the same: deep, but cut off from everything else.
The habit of digging one case to the bottom gives depth, but not breadth. For breadth you have to look at causes and consequences: what came earlier, what was argued with, what grew out of it. Art became the first subject I decided to try this on.
The course was put together in October 2026. I am taking it myself, one hall at a time.
Dates, attributions, and wording were checked against museum data and Gombrich, but the course was put together by someone who is not an art historian. If you spot an inaccuracy or know what to add, write to me: sergey@povod.press.
The course is based on Ernst Gombrich, “The Story of Art”; the chapters are listed in each hall. Dates follow museum data; “c.” means the exact year is unknown.
Images: Wikimedia Commons. The paintings are in the public domain; photographs of architecture and sculpture are used under their authors’ licenses: Doryphoros. Naples, National Archaeological Museum. (49059407566).jpg (CC BY-SA 4.0); Interior oculus of the Rome Pantheon.jpg (CC BY-SA 4.0); Mosaic of Justinianus I - Basilica San Vitale (Ravenna).jpg (CC BY-SA 4.0); Notre-Dame de Paris 2013-07-24.jpg (CC BY-SA 3.0); Florence Duomo from Michelangelo hill.jpg (CC BY-SA 4.0); 'David' by Michelangelo Fir JBU005 denoised.jpg (CC BY-SA 3.0); Ecstasy of Saint Teresa September 2015-2a.jpg (CC BY-SA 4.0); Smolny Convent.jpg (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Works by Picasso and Duchamp are protected by copyright, so they are given as links. Map: Natural Earth.
A personal project by Sergey Malyshev for Povod magazine. The Playfair Display, Inter, and EB Garamond fonts are distributed under the SIL Open Font License.