Making Sense of Ideas on Art: Image theories from G.W.F. Hegel to Horst Bredekamp
Online
Evening Study Online
Dr Matthias Volmer
5 pre-recorded lectures with 5 live Zoom seminars at 18:00, over 5 weeks from Wednesday 7 October – Wednesday 4 November 2026
£245
Course Description
This course traces key arguments in art history and visual theory, asking three intertwined questions: How do images act? How does style emerge? How is meaning produced? We begin with G.W.F. Hegel’s Aesthetics, where art appears as “Geist” (spirit) in sensuous form, then turn to Heinrich Wölfflin, who re-anchors historical perception in formal binaries that shape an epoch’s way of seeing. Erwin Panofsky articulates a three-tiered method—pre-iconographic, iconographic, iconological—linking motif, symbol, and worldview. With Ernst Gombrich, perception and practice take the lead: “making and matching,” schema and correction, – this is style as problem-solving. Maurice Merleau-Ponty grounds image and vision phenomenologically in the “embodied chiasm of seer and seen” – the notion that subject and object of perception are not separate, but inextricably linked. Svetlana Alpers reframes Dutch painting as a descriptive visual culture that unsettles Italian narrative norms. Clement Greenberg codifies medium-specific formalism and painting’s self-critique, while Rosalind Krauss moves from medium to index and the “expanded field.” Francis Haskell ties taste, canon, and meaning to patronage, collecting, and institutions. The arc culminates with Horst Bredekamp’s “Bildakt”: images are described as agents within technical, social, and scientific assemblages.
While this course requires no pre-existing knowledge of art theory, a basic grounding in art history and an interest in philosophical concepts and the history of ideas will be beneficial.
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Lecturer's Biography
Dr Matthias Vollmer is Adjunct Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin European Studies Programme. He studied art history, philosophy and orientalism at the Freie Universität Berlin and wrote his PhD thesis on medieval book illustration. Matthias teaches interdisciplinary seminars on medieval and Renaissance art, as well as courses on modern art at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Universität der Künste Berlin, the Universität Münster and the Universität Frankfurt. He currently researches the principles of visualisation in art and science.