Painting Icons: A History of the Portrait from Byzantium to Basquiat – Short Course at the Warburg Institute

Unknown, Self Portrait, ca. 1800–1805, watercolour on ivory, 8.3 × 8.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Dale T. Johnson Fund, 2014, accession number: 2014.512. Public domain.

This summer, the Warburg Institute is offering the online short course Painting Icons: A History of the Portrait from Byzantium to Basquiat. Taking in some of the biggest names in the history of art, as well as some less well-known figures, the course will also explore how, by specialising in portraiture, certain artists throughout the centuries became icons in their own right.

In five sessions, this course introduces students to the development of portraiture as both an expression and a tool of power, be that religious, social, political or celebrity. It explores the background to a visual language still very much in use today – from selfies to adverts – and considers portraiture in materials other than paint, such as stone, metal and wax.

The Virgin Mary gazes enigmatically from the surface of the 6th-century Salus Populi Romani as she holds the Christ Child in her arms. Since then, she has watched over the people of Rome through disaster, invasion, and plague, invoked as recently as the COVID-19 pandemic. Fourteen hundred years later, Marilyn Monroe smouldered beneath hooded eyes from Andy Warhol’s canvas in a series of images, one of which, the 1964 Shot Sage Blue Marilyn holds the current record for most expensive 20th-century artwork sold at auction. What links these two seemingly disparate images?

The course (which is designed for beginners) will meet weekly from 4 June to 2 July 2025. For further details and booking, visit the Warburg Institute website.