Topic 1. Introduction. Understanding art and artists. Introduction to various concepts that will be worked on throughout the course and are independent of the historical-artistic period in which we find ourselves.

Topic 2. Representing life. Prehistoric and primitive peoples. Prehistoric art will be studied from a historiographical and ontological point of view, reflecting on the artistic meaning of its representation.

Topic 3. Eternity and art. Mesopotamia and Egypt. To learn about Mesopotamian and Egyptian art and to deal with its artistic manifestations through the conception of spirituality, life and death in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Topic 4. Beauty in art. Greece. How art is understood in Greece and how it is structured within its cosmogony, being the basis of the art and aesthetics of Western art.

Topic 5. ?Veni, vidi, vici?. Rome. Rome as conqueror of the existing world and how it adapts the art of other cultures into an art that is the image of its hegemony and political power.

Topic 6. Europe and the triumphant Church. Channelling of religiosity in Romanesque art. Changes produced in Gothic art, provoked by a changing world, with wars, new social classes and new perspectives of a new world.

Topic 7. Italy and its artistic hegemony during the Renaissance. The great canons produced in the Italian Renaissance, to which we are still partly indebted.

Topic 8. Everyday life reflected in the artistic genres of the Baroque. The creation of new artistic genres, linked to the Counter-Reformation and the perspective of the new and old continent.

Topic 9. The search for new paths. Nineteenth-century art. How new technologies and materials affect the vision and perception of the world and, therefore, art. The 19th century as a time when the traditional artistic foundations forged in the Renaissance begin to break down to give way to the change that will take place in the 20th century.

Topic 10. The reinvention of art in the Avant-gardes of the early 20th century. The rupture of the art known until then and the new artistic proposals of the Vanguards at the beginning of the 20th century.

Topic 11. The demand of the artist and the art of life. Second half of the 20th century. The pre-eminence of the role of the artist in the execution of the work of art and how this is linked to life itself through the new artistic trends.

Topic 12. The paradigm of contemporary art. Limits and singularities as a new artistic genre. Transcending the object: from the dematerialisation and conceptualisation of the work to ephemerisation in artistic practices. New times and spaces in the work of art. Ontological ambiguity and AIs: the presence of the artist and the role of the spectator.