Most of the paintings created before the 20th century are devoted to the same subjects. To begin with, it will be enough to orient yourself in a set of main biblical events, remember about two dozen mythological plots and characters, and distinguish the most popular medieval saints.

If you want to understand better, read Nikolai Kuhn’s book “Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece”, retold excerpts from the “Golden Legend” by Jacob Voraginsky about the lives of saints and, of course, the Bible - at least in an adapted version.

Check which of these plots and characters you can recognize with your eyes closed:

• Biblical subjects: the fall, expulsion from paradise, David, Judith, the Annunciation, the adoration of the Magi, flight into Egypt, the holy family, the passion of Christ, crucifixion, mourning.
• Mythological subjects and characters: the court of Paris, the birth of Venus, Athena and Marsyas, the labors of Hercules, the centauromachy, the Minotaur, the abduction of Europa, Cupid and Psyche.
• Medieval saints: Sebastian, Stephen, Jerome, Catherine of Alexandria, Francis of Assisi.

2. Interpret the symbols

In art, especially classical art, nothing happens for nothing. Each detail carries its own symbolic meaning.

There are universal symbols: they have not changed for centuries and are characteristic of most cultures. For example, it is useful to know that the white lily traditionally signifies the purity and beauty of the Virgin Mary, and the skull always hints at death.

Most characters vary depending on the country or period. To understand all this, read James Hall’s good book “A Dictionary of Plots and Symbols in Art.” The main thing is to understand general principles. This way you can guess at the level of intuition what this or that object means.

3. Determine the style of the painting by its striking characteristics

The style of a painting is a very important thing, allowing you to mentally fit the canvas into the context of the era and find out which works to compare it with. The good news is that key styles are few and far between. It is enough to understand the differences in a dozen directions, and you can roughly estimate the century of creation of paintings painted up to 1900.

The art of Byzantium, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, classicism, rococo, romanticism, realism, impressionism and movements in the art of the 20th century - this is a set with which you can move mountains.

For a quick educational program, visit the course of three lectures “”. For a thorough study, the book “History of Art” by Ernst Gombrich, “A Brief History of Art” by Nina Dmitrieva or “Fundamentals of Art History” by Horst and Anthony Janson are suitable.

4. Share your impressions

If art does not yet make such an impression on you, share any associations, sensations and thoughts that the paintings suggest. It’s impossible to make a mistake here, and everyone will appreciate it.

What to do when the paintings do not evoke absolutely no response? Exercise! Before going to the museum, read about the artist, the characteristics of his style or era. Since the visual part leaves you indifferent, perhaps specific stories will interest you.

5. Talk about technology

Performance technique is a win-win topic. You can literally describe everything you see. The main thing is to learn to notice details. From a technical point of view, we can discuss color, light, composition and stroke characteristics. It’s better, of course, if you can listen several times to how artists talk about paintings. For example, the Level One lecture “Five Artists: Understanding and Loving Geniuses” helps you look at the world’s masterpieces from the perspective of a professional.

However, even without this, you can be observant and notice that somewhere the picture is smooth, and somewhere it seems to be convex due to the texture of the stroke. In some places the light is scattered throughout the entire canvas, and in others it is directed at a specific point, like a spotlight beam.

Quantity will eventually turn into quality. The more you look, the more you will notice.

For those who in the paintings of Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt, Bruegel, Cezanne and many other masters see only their material objectivity and their symbolic content, the doors to the world of artistic power and beauty will forever be closed.

Johannes Itten, artist, theorist of new art

6. Don't be afraid to argue

The terrible secret of art critics: the truth is nowhere or almost nowhere. What direction does the artist’s work belong to, who or what inspired him, how to interpret the symbols - any of the questions causes heated discussions among specialists.

It is clear that you should not overuse and openly mix sour with bland, so knowledge of symbols and artistic styles will not be superfluous.

First, study them, and then feel free to discuss controversial issues: by this time you will probably have already developed your own point of view.

To stock up on many good arguments for future discussions, look at Sergei Daniel’s book “The Art of Seeing”: it will not only help you practice describing a painting, but will also teach you how to perceive painting in a high-quality manner.

7. Don’t discount the 20th century

Most people like it when everything is clear, beautiful and preferably with naked women, and they consider “Black Square” or the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko to be daub. This is a comfortable position, but it immediately reveals that you are a beginner.

A small observation: the more you immerse yourself in art history, the easier it is for you to accept the paintings of the last century. Not everyone is ready to love her, but everyone stops saying “I can do that too.”

8. Focus on contemporary art

At least at the level of terminology. Introducing the idea of ​​actionism, happenings, performance or art intervention in a timely manner is priceless.

Seriously, contemporary art can be different. The main secret of his perception is that you should not go to the first exhibition you come across without preparation. You need to read and understand if this is all for you.

There is art designed to evoke shock emotions, even horror and disgust. There is also something that evokes only admiration for the artist’s skill. If you are not yet ready for the first one, you should find out about it in advance and not torture yourself needlessly.

Iman Maleki. Girl at the window

Aesthetic contemporary art includes the works of the Iranian photorealist artist Iman Maleki. Pay attention to the attention to detail: the strands of hair and the watch bracelet are depicted with extreme precision.

9. Be aware of and prepare for major events

Nothing is discussed more in the art world than important imports from major museums. They write about this in the news, on social networks - everywhere. It is also worth keeping an eye on the plans for the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

Forewarned is forearmed. Exhibitions are usually accompanied by annotations, lectures and excursions. You can further prepare by studying the era to which the author’s works belong.

10. Ask stupid questions

The less you think about how you look in the eyes of others, and the more you are interested in art itself, the faster you approach the ideal interlocutor with whom you want to go to a museum. Check out all the art questions on The Question and relax, you're not alone.

When the stress is relieved, explore a good selection of art books on Bookmate and attend lectures. There you will find guaranteed good lectures with hundreds of reviews that will fuel the desire to immerse yourself in art more and more.

Everything is not limited to fine arts: lectures on architecture, classical music, history and religion will help you better navigate different spheres of beauty and, as a result, perceive life in a new way.

Anastasia Pogozheva got tired of sitting in the office and launched her own educational project. He takes advance payments from listeners, sets his own price for landlords (below the market) and does not like famous lecturers - “they don’t have a spark.” Acts against the rules, recouped the investment in a month. How?

“Everyone who studied at the institute remembers this feeling: the lecturer is reading, you fall asleep,” begins Anastasia Pogozheva.

We are talking in the meeting room " Workstation» - a coworking space on Leninsky Prospekt, where Level One rents a table for several workstations instead of an office. Let's find out which lectures people don't sleep in and how they make money from them.

From idea to excursions

Previously, Nastya was an economist, but while on maternity leave she started thinking about switching to something creative. At first I wanted to create an agency that trains tour guides, and at the beginning of 2015 I began to develop a trial project with the Tripster team - a platform for tour guides and simply enthusiastic people from different countries, on which travelers are offered original excursions.

— Tour guides post their offers on Tripster as a marketplace. They earn good money, so no one wanted to study anything additional,” says Pogozheva. “Then the idea of ​​giving lectures came to my mind.

Level One was soon born, its creation inspired by foreign analogues. Anastasia wanted to give incendiary and useful lectures, something like Russian TED Talks.

By that time, lectures as a form of leisure had already gained popularity in Moscow, but only “Theories and Practices” constantly worked in a similar format - a platform for knowledge exchange with regular lectures and seminars was opened in 2009. To monetize T&P, they created special projects and placed advertisements on the site, and most events were held one-time and free of charge.

Level One courses, on the other hand, cost money, and the same lectures are repeated every one or several weeks.

— Level One’s competitors appeared quickly. For example, the Synchronization project, which was founded by McKinsey consultant Andrei Lobanov, gives the example of Pogozhev.

From partnership to independence

Pogozheva developed the project together with Tripster founder Alexei Melchakov. Lectures were offered on the platform as another service in addition to excursions. The first direction we chose was architecture, and the lecturers were six different teachers - an architect, an art historian, an urban planner, a Moscow specialist, a journalist and a historian. The demand, the organizers say, “was enormous.” However, by September 2015, Pogozheva and Melchakov decided not to work together. Anastasia is silent about the reasons:

— I always believed that it is better to do business with a partner, so I tried to do a joint project. When I realized that we had different professional interests, I had to make the difficult decision that I would continue alone.

In December 2015, Pogozheva launched a website called Level One.

Alexey Melchakov, founder of Tripster:

— When we at Tripster became cramped in the excursion format, we launched the educational project “Course of a Real Muscovite,” which consisted of six meetings with historians and Moscow experts. Nastya was one of the course participants and came to our company with an offer to conduct excursions for corporate clients. Negotiations with companies were not very successful, and we abandoned the idea. But they launched a course of lectures on architecture: we worked together with the lecturers, and sales were my responsibility. But I soon realized that the Tripster lecture format was not interesting. By this time, Nastya had learned everything to do lectures on her own.

From website to revenue

The development of the site cost 200,000 rubles, which Anastasia invested from her own savings.

“If you launch such a project, prepare for additional expenses: the site will have to be constantly refined and updated,” Pogozheva warns. — Add to this the budget for advertising and promotion, as well as fees for lecturers and rental of venues.

A separate puzzle is the venues for events. The obvious school and university premises were no longer needed - as we remember, Anastasia wanted to move away from boring stories about classical education. Renting a permanent premises is expensive and ineffective. As a result, Level One conducts classes in different places - places where students are interested in visiting even just like that, without a lecture, but you are unlikely to go there without a reason.

Today, Level One lectures are held at 20 Moscow venues: in the ARTPLAY creative cluster, the Solyanka art gallery, the DI Telegraph co-working space, the Rimsky-Korsakov club, the library named after. I. S. Turgenev, book club-store "Hyperion". Pogozheva pays everyone a fixed amount to rent premises for a few hours and agrees to hold lectures regularly.

“I realized that if we come to an agreement with museums and clubs, it will be cheap for us and interesting for people.” What’s important is that we managed to bring prices below market prices. We say: either you accept our conditions, or we go to others. To attract new audiences and fill the halls, they agreed.

About a third of the revenue is spent on renting the site and fees for lecturers.

— “Theories and Practices” paved the way for other educational projects. When we started, people were already fed up with entertainment; they wanted a qualitatively different kind of leisure time. By the time of the launch of Level One, the trend of a general repackaging of the format had reached the lectures; the organizers tried to turn everything boring Soviet into beautiful, glossy and Western-style. And things went well.

From ambition to charisma

From the very start, students are allowed to attend lectures only by prior registration and prepayment.

“This is beneficial for both the organizer and the visitor,” Pogozheva assures. — It’s easy for the first one to calculate the number of listeners, and the second one has an incentive to come because he paid.

At the same time, Anastasia had no confidence that people would really come. But instead of carefully testing one lecture at a time, Pogozheva organized a large-scale launch - 10 course streams at once. It was scary to launch, Nastya admits, but even if no one came to the lectures, it would not bring large financial losses: we would simply cancel unfilled streams and return people’s money.

The founder bet that Level One lectures were useful and adapted to modern life.

— Some people don’t enjoy going to museums, others want to read books more carefully or regret that after watching a movie they can’t discuss it. We wanted to solve these problems. To do this, it was necessary to select material so that the person who came to the lecture would receive a certain coordinate system, for example, begin to understand what architecture is in general and understand a little about architectural styles.

The second important factor is the lecturer’s ability to interest the audience.

“It was not easy to find such teachers, especially for me, a person from the world of finance who did not interact with representatives of the creative community. I wrote advertisements for communities of people who understand architecture and want to talk about it, but don’t know how. She suggested, let’s work together and do something cool.

The entrance ticket for lecturers is the general level of charisma: it is important that the person is charming, knows how to structure information and speak in front of an audience. All this is checked in test lectures.

— It is impossible to predict how a person behaves with an audience if you are talking to him one on one. Therefore, in addition to meeting with a potential lecturer, we are holding a free test lecture, where people who visited the site that day sign up. After test lectures, Level One collects feedback from students and makes a decision about working with the applicant.

But it didn’t work out with eminent teachers: they often talk without sparkle, as if for their own people. Now at Level One, all the lecturers are mostly young - 27-35 years old, and their eyes sparkle.

The efforts were not in vain: the project brought profit in the first month after the site was launched. Now about 2,500 people a month listen to lectures. The cost of the lesson is 900 rubles, most often they are bought in blocks of two or three. Level One's monthly revenue is 2.5 million rubles.

Danil Perushev, founder of T&P (“Theories and Practices”):

— The demand for “fast” knowledge is huge. How deep this knowledge is is a separate question. Adults have no time to learn, and they do not know how to do it on their own. That's why formats like Level One will grow and grow.

From lectures to...

Level One became successful largely due to social networks, Pogozheva admits.

— After the “divorce” from Tripster, all our efforts went into creating a website - it was necessary to attract a new audience. Facebook helped a lot with this. To promote the project, Nastya placed advertisements on KudaGo and other city portals with events, but it was Facebook that turned out to be the cheapest and effective way notify people about events.

The founder of Level One believes that this market has room to grow. In the future, she plans to organize personal courses: “This is a big story for the long term.”

Andrey Lobanov, founder of Synchronization:

Talking about art in simple language is a very important task that almost no one solved a few years ago. One of the first was the Tripster project, where Nastya worked then. They launched a cool course on developing architectural vision for people just starting to get acquainted with this art direction. Now the situation is changing, projects such as Level One and Synchronization are creating a market. According to our estimates, more than 400-500 lectures on art are held in Moscow every month, which are attended by tens of thousands of people. In November, Synchronization held almost 60 events, which were attended by more than 1,300 listeners (turnover 1 million rubles).

Nastya and I discussed the possibility of working together, but in the end we decided that thanks to healthy competition, the overall effect of Synchronization and Level One would be stronger than if it were a common project. A runner in a competition runs faster if someone is running behind him, because he has someone to look up to. So are we. It's nice to have a strong competitor running next to you.

Which allows you to select lectures on art, architecture and classical music. We pass the microphone.

I'm Nastya Pogozheva, I'm 30.

Not long ago we launched the educational project Level One. This is a service that allows you to select offline lectures on art, architecture and classical music.

We provide high-quality lectures for those who do not have enough time to understand complex topics. That is, for approximately everyone - which is why Level One has become the most widespread commercial educational story in the areas that we managed to cover. Almost 700 people took courses in architecture, and a total of 1,500 participants attended various courses. In a year, we plan to hold lectures for thousands of participants per month in various areas of culture - we will add lectures on history, literature, the city (about Moscow) and philosophy.

All lecturers undergo strict selection. These are people who are well versed in the topic, know how to communicate with the audience, know how to captivate participants with the subject and are able to convey their knowledge in a structured manner. We work on the material with each lecturer and conduct several test sessions until the lecture is well-rehearsed.

This all greatly distinguishes us from other lectures in the field of culture, which are prepared only by the lecturer, are held once and are intended mainly for specialists.

As a matter of principle, we do not provide online lectures. Firstly, the layer of emotions that arise from interacting with the lecturer, from meeting new people, from visiting interesting places immediately disappears - and without these emotions the material is remembered much worse. Secondly, most people lack the motivation to complete online courses. Thirdly, it is difficult to perceive online, because it is objectively impossible to make a blockbuster out of a lecture. You immediately want to do something at the same time, and this reduces your attention. In general, online is suitable for highly motivated people, but not for those whom we just want to captivate.

Technologically, the selection of our lectures is very convenient. Lectures are booked and paid for on the website, a reminder is sent one day before the event, presentations and additional materials arrive the next day, a missed lecture can always be rescheduled to another date (since lectures are repeated many times), lectures can be given as a gift, and a review can be published after attending a lecture. Reviews are left by almost 15% of participants, this is a very high figure.

Our team includes a project manager, a marketer, two developers and two lecture support staff. And ten more lecturers, but soon there will be twice as many.

We launched lectures on our platform in early December 2015. We did not attract investments, we work with our own funds. Currently, about 500 people per month enroll in the courses, but as the number of topics increases, there will be more participants.

We return the floor to the readers.

Would you like to have the floor and talk about your startup? .