Article: The Art of the Projected Image: The optical lantern as a didactic instrument in the Art History lectures of Willem Vogelsang (1875-1954) by Jamilla Notebaard

The optical lantern was the central medium through which Art History professor Willem Vogelsang (1875-1954) taught his students ‘how to see’. As the first ordinarius in Art History in the Netherlands, Vogelsang focused on creating the right educational setting to turn his students into professional art historians. In his lectures the optical lantern and its projected images functioned as a didactic instrument to make his students (visually) understand compositional and stylistic differences and similarities within and between artworks. The lantern allowed for the exchange of art historical knowledge, making it a reciprocal process of information gathering and acquisition. It enabled Vogelsang to visually open up the world of art history to a whole new generation.

Keywords:

Willem Vogelsang, projected image, optical lantern, Art History, knowledge transfer, teaching.

Article published (in Dutch) in the academic journal De Moderne Tijd.

The open access (author’s manuscript) version of the article can be found here.

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Notebaard, Jamilla. 2020. “De Kunst van het Geprojecteerde Beeld. De didactische waarde van de projectielantaarn voor de kunsthistorische lessen van Willem Vogelsang (1875-1954).” De Moderne Tijd 4 (1-2): 88-107.