Department of Art History
At the University of Tartu, art history is one of the fundamental disciplines of the Humanities with an aim to provide a possibly wide academic basis as for the speciality as a whole as well as for comprehension of its single approaches (nuances). Art history allows us to understand history through its visual aspect, offering any image an expounding meaning, placing a single element into a wider philosophical context for which the University of Tartu with the variety of its scientific disciplines offers almost inexhaustible options. Art history is a discipline with its feet in the distant past but its head in the future because no matter how we would appreciate it from today’s viewpoint, a breakthrough of visual language use has not only started but already now it demands a new system and regulating hand – people, for whom a museum means a landscape and landscape in its turn – a museum. In case of art history it is hard to distinguish between big and small, Europe and Estonia, world and ourselves.