The old paintings in museums can seem distant from us—the stuff of polite interest, perhaps real curiosity, but nothing more. How can we open ourselves up to being transformed by art, encountering it in a more meaningful way? Focusing on prominent paintings of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic periods, this course places an emphasis on the great human themes—love, joy, sadness—inherent in the art. Releasing these themes requires as much from us as from the art itself. Learning how to look at art, we will more fundamentally consider why we do so. Only then will great paintings by artists such as Masaccio, Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Poussin, La Tour, and Vermeer open themselves to us.

This all-new iteration of “How to Look at Art and Why” is a version of the popular course Alexander Nemerov has taught to undergraduates at Yale and Stanford since 2007 and a follow-up to his 2023 Continuing Studies course. Told in 10 lectures or “chapters,” the course will unfold like a book, focusing on such themes as being called by art and creating a mental chapel of the works that move us. Such study entails a vulnerability, not least from the professor himself, about what works of art may offer us. The course holds that paintings are occasions for us to pause, to attend both to them and to ourselves. Different from self-help, the course will delve deeply into the supposedly irrelevant past to affirm ourselves in a drastic emptying of ego. Art history is the course’s path but not its goal. The goal is to live a life closer to moments of emotional truth.