48 lectures (30 minutes each).

"Fine arts & music"--Container.

GMD: videodisc.

pt. 1. Continuity and transformation: what is art? -- Art as the offspring of religion -- Preclassical Greek art -- Toward the classical Athenian moment -- Beyond the borders of classical Greek art -- The birth of the new: Hellenistic art -- Hellenistic, Etruscan, and early Roman art -- Roman and Judaean art -- Early Christian art and its progeny -- The beginnings of Jewish art -- Christian medieval art and architecture -- The language of Romanesque and Gothic art.

pt. 2. Islamic art from abstract to figurative -- Jewish medieval art and architecture -- Early Renaissance painting in central Italy -- 15th century Italian Renaissance painting -- Renaissance painting beyond the Alps -- Renaissance sculpture: toward Florence -- High Renaissance in central Italy -- The rebirth of classical dynamism -- The light of the Veneto -- 16th century Northern European painting -- Transformation of people, objects, ideas.

pt. 3. The Reformation and the Mannerist crisis -- Baroque shadows: Venice to Madrid to Rome -- Shadow and light from Rome to the lowlands -- Northern landscapes and life sweeps -- The counter-Reformation from Italy outward -- Revolutions in Spanish and English painting -- France's gold and silver ages -- Politics and romanticism -- From realism to impressionism -- From Paris to the East -- American romantic realism and its progeny -- Fin de Siècle European art movements.

pt. 4. Asia and Africa in the Western mind -- They all came to Paris -- Revolutions in early 20th century painting --Figuration and abstraction: the struggle -- Developments in sculpture: Rodin to Judd -- New worlds of architecture: Wright to Hadid -- The edges of West and East -- Art, trauma, and politics -- Defining modern Jewish art -- The problem of categories in modern art -- The explosion of modernist media -- Art, politics, and religion from era to era.

Lecturer: Ori Z. Soltes, Georgetown University.

DVD.