Visual Literacy: Understanding Images across Europe – Past and Present (educational module, 4EU+) 3105-4EU-VL-K

The main objective of the module, consisting of online
tutorials, online conversatory classes and three field
workshops, is to address the phenomenon of visual literacy
from theoretical, art historical and practical point of view.
The students will have an opportunity to experience first-
hand the cultural framework of the ways in which images
were and are perceived through work on scientific-artistic
projects carried out in intercultural groups. These group
projects will be developed under the supervision of the
tutor.
There are five tutorials to choose from:
1. Multiplied Images: Artistic Practices in the
Twentieth Century. The aim of this tutorial, led by prof.
Giorgio Zanchetti, Davide Colombo, PhD and Giulia
Kimberly Colombo is to analyse different artistic practices
in the twentieth century, which were based on
appropriation, collage, photomontage, found footage and
re-enactment. Heterogeneous and non-artistic images will
be examined along with visual sources. The contamination
of low and high models, as well as the circulation of
contemporary art and artists’ iconic images in media and
popular culture will also be addressed.

2. Visual literacy: Between Educational, Artistic and
Curatorial Approaches. This is a tutorial conducted by
Vendula Fremlová, PhD and Pavla Gajdošíková, PhD,
which will be focused on contemporary art, art education
and curating as a form of dialogue and as a way of
broadening critical thinking. The students will be
researching the contemporary art field and analysing its
tendencies, topics or “turns”. On this basis the students will
try to develop their own curatorial project together with
educational activities (art mediation). The students will be
encouraged to their own artistic attempts to understand the
attitude of an artist as well.
3. Visualising Matter: The Visual literacy in Early
Modern Europe. This tutorial, led by Zuzanna Sarnecka,
PhD, will demonstrate the benefits of technical art history
for the visual literacy in Early Modern Europe. The

students will work with recipe books, artists’ manuals and
inventories to visualise images (their colours, textures,
forms etc.) from written descriptions. The course will
introduce the significance of scientific investigations
(including X-rays and XRF) in a connoisseurial approach
to images and the role of memory as the repository of
visual data. The students will also analyse travelers’
accounts to draw conclusions about the language of visual
uncertainty and the description of unknown artefacts.
4. Cinematic Cities: Reading Urban Spaces in Film,
tutorial led by Joanna Smalcerz, PhD focuses on the
representation of urban spaces in film and explores the
relationship between urban and cinematic identities of New
York and Rome in the twentieth and twenty-first century.
Through visual analysis of films featuring these cities, but
also of films shot in Milan, Prague and Warsaw students
will break down the visual language of representation of
urban spaces in film in order to explore both the strategies
of the cinematic representation of the city in general and
the topoi linked to the city and the urban condition of life
in the Western culture.
What phenomena shape urban identity and in what ways is
film a medium that is revealing of urban condition? What
are the specificities of filmic construction of urban
spatiality? In what ways is the collective imagination of
cities shaped by their cinematic portrayal? Are filmic
depictions of cities generative of their new identities? The
aim is to develop visual literacy required to understand the
complexities of filmic representation, as well as to
investigate the dynamics of the mutually constitutive
intertwinement of the city and film in modernity.
5. Colours in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art:
Experiments, Failures and Success Stories, a tutorial
conducted by Karolina Mroziewicz, PhD and Jan
Dienstbier, PhD will explore materiality, significance and
functions of colour in 15th- and 16th-century works of art,
mainly illuminated manuscripts and early prints.
Techniques of illumination and colour printing; expensive
materials such as gold and parchment; hybrid prints;
promises of technical examination of the colours will be
discussed along with the unsuccessful experiments with the
applications of colour in the 15 th and 16 th centuries

The students will experiment with the process of colour
printmaking, production of pigments and colourants as
well as reflect on the conditions that made pre-modern
images legible, meaningful and precious to their pre-
modern beholders. They will also experience first-hand the
challenges and limitations of the reconstruction of the late
medieval and early modern colour palette.
Apart from discussing above mentioned aspects of visual
culture and visual literacy, each of the five tutorials will
offer the students the chance to experiment with the
usefulness of material and digital images in developing and
sharing ideas and will contribute to raising critical thinking
through “hands-on” investigation, discussion- and inquiry-
guided learning. The tutorial will take place twice a month.
In the remaining weeks the students will partake in
conversatory classes.
Conversatory classes will offer an overview of approaches
and case studies that shed light on various historical,
social, cultural and artistic aspects of visual literacy and
visual culture, corresponding with the main subjects of
tutorials..
The tutoring activities and conversatory classes will be
complemented by three field workshops: in Milan (January
2023), Prague (March 2023) and Warsaw (June 2023).
These two-day workshops will take place in art institutions
collaborating with our universities (e.g. Museo del
Novecento, Milano, Civico archivio fotografico del
Comune di Milano; National Gallery and Museum of
Decorative Arts in Prague; Print Room and Early Print
Department of the University Library in Warsaw, National
Museum in Warsaw) and will offer an opportunity for
developing ideas for the group projects in an interplay with
objects of art and in discussions with peers, teachers and
art curators.