a. General frame
In the first three weeks lesson will focus on the general assessment of the subject: from the “artistic literature” by Julius von Schlosser to the “history of art criticism” by Lionello Venturi, to the contributions of the second half of Twentieth century, from the “proposals for an art criticism” by Roberto Longhi to the “art historiography” by Paola Barocchi. Special attention will be dedicated to main European schools and intellectual tradition: from the Vienna School to Anglo-American connoisseurship, from Italian historical method and the defence of its national heritage to the iconology of Aby Warburg, from the psychology of form and vision to pure visuality theories and the social history of art, from material culture and the anthropological approach to the atrophy of modernism and the decoloinal and decultural perspectives of the end of the second millennium.

b. Monographic focus: "Informalism between Europe and the US: texts and contexts”
In the last three weeks lessons will be dedicated to the most different positions of informalism in postwar international criticism and early historiography in Europe and the US. A special focus will be set thus on informalism, through textual analysis of essays, articles, reviews and manifestos in their context. Also considering the international strategies of the promotion and acknowledgement of the movement.