The Italian Cultural & Community Center of Houston presents The Meaning behind the Masterpieces: Iconography in Italian Art, a three-part art history lecture series.

Over three 1 1/2 hout sessions, the class will guide students through the long history of Italian art spanning from Ancient Rome through the twentieth century. By the end of our time together, students will know how to find, identify and understand symbols in some of the most famous Italian masterpieces.

This lecture series will explore iconography, a branch of art history that studies the identification and description of images’ contents. It will also go a step further in investigating iconology, the analysis and interpretation of the cultural context that surrounds images. Students will observe how images travel through centuries and places to understand the meaning behind some of greatest Italian artworks.

As art historians do, students will investigate symbols related to mythology, religion, and popular culture and identify the fictional characters and real people that populate masterpieces: artists themselves, popes, kings, queens, lords, gods, goddesses and many others that made history.