Program Overview

Introduction to the Courtauld Institute of Art

The Courtauld Institute of Art is an internationally renowned centre for the teaching and research of art history and a major public gallery.

Program Details

Undergraduate and Postgraduate Programs

The Courtauld Institute offers world-renowned programs in the history, conservation, curation, and business of art.

Short Courses

The Courtauld Institute provides a range of short courses, including:

• Study Tours
  • Built upon Waters: The Sea in Venetian Art from Tintoretto to Canaletto
  • Bloomsbury in Sussex
  • Munich Moderns – May 2026
  • Ravenna: Capital of the Mosaic
  • Vienna 1900: A Total Work of Art – May 2026
  • NEW Medieval Exeter and Devon
  • Munich Moderns – September 2026
  • Vienna 1900: A Total Work of Art – September 2026
  • NEW Eighteenth-Century Idylls: A Study Tour of the 'Matchless Vale' of the Thames
  • NEW Disegno: Workshop Tradition, Concept, and Living Practice – A Study Tour to Pisa
  • Uptown, Midtown, Downtown: An Art-Historical Tour of New York City
  • NEW Masterpieces of Early-Modern Spain: A Study Tour to Madrid and Toledo
• Summer School
  • Summer School online
    • 2- NEW Philip Guston and Twentieth-Century American Art
    • 3- Carlo Crivelli and His Contemporaries
    • 4- Nature, Gender, Form: New Approaches to the Pre-Raphaelites
  • Summer School on campus
    • 5- The Rise and Fall of the 'High Renaissance'
    • 6-Re-Imagining the Everyday: Genre Paintings and Prints in Sixteenth-to Eighteenth-century Europe
    • 7-Rococo to Revolution: Histories of French Art
    • 8-Collectors, Exhibitions and Art Dealers: Modern Art in Europe
    • 9- NEW- Post-War German Art and the Question of National Identity
    • 10- Venezianità: The Art of Being Venetian in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
    • 18-Bright Lights and Dark Visions: Nordic Art from the Danish Golden Age to Edvard Munch
    • 21- NEW Beauty, Luxury, and Power: The Arts of the Mughal Empire
    • 23- A Nervous State of Affairs: Art in Vienna
    • 17-NEW Modernity and the Female Body in late 19th-Century Paris
    • 20 – The Byzantine World: the Arts of the East Roman Empire from the Fourth to the Fifteenth Centuries
    • 12-Constructing the Heart of Empire: London's Public Architecture
    • 15-The Art of the Crusades
    • 11- On the Roof of the World: An Introduction to the Art and Architecture of Tibet and the Himalayas
    • 14-NEW From Rodin to Hepworth: The Emergence of Modern Sculpture in London and Paris
    • 13-Fathers of Modern Art: Manet and Cézanne
    • 24-Unruly Britannia: The Brit Art Renaissance of
    • 22-NEW War and Peace in Netherlandish Art, 1500–1700
    • 19-NEW Art and Audacity: Women in Modernism c.1905–1925
    • 16-NEW In Pursuit of Fame: Art and Patronage in Baroque Rome
• Spring School
  • Variations on a Theme: Modernism in Art and Music
  • Making Sense of Art History: The Fundamentals
  • NEW- Making Sense of Christian Art: Key Figures, Style and Contexts
  • "The Root of Everything" – Drawing in Europe from the Renaissance to the Modern Period
  • Looking at Ourselves: A Historical and Practical Exploration of Portrait Photography
• Autumn School
  • Making Sense of the Arts of Islam: An Introduction
  • Making Sense of 'The Classical' in Art
  • Making Sense of Modern and Contemporary Art: The Pleasures of Looking
  • Variations on a Theme: Art & Music in Early Baroque Europe
  • National Socialist, "Degenerate", Émigré and Looted Art: The Aesthetics, Economics and Ethics of Art in the Third Reich
  • The Art of the Sacred in Byzantium and Italy: Materiality and Meaning
• Evening Study at the Courtauld
  • Holbein at the Court of Henry VIII
  • ARCHIVE: The Emergence of Modern Sculpture in Paris and London, 1890 – 1930
  • ARCHIVE: The Long Road to Success: Giulio Romano between Rome and Mantua
  • The Fear and the Fury: Abstract Expressionism
  • NEW- The Arts of the Aztec Empire
  • NEW The Materiality of Modern and Contemporary Painting in Five Chapters
  • Making Sense of Ideas on Art: Image theories from G.W.F. Hegel to Horst Bredekamp
  • Variations on a Theme: The Renaissance in Art and Music
  • NEW Not Room Enough: American Art Beyond the City
  • Europe and the World: Encounters in Art
  • NEW Digging up the Past: Collecting Antiquities and Paleo-Christian Relics in Early-Modern Rome
  • Magnificent Women: Elite Female Agency and the Arts of Medieval Europe
  • Intersecting Practices: Architecture and the Figurative Arts in Early Modern Italy

Course Description: Digging up the Past

In this course, we will investigate how pre-archaeological excavations transformed subterranean objects, like Roman sculptures and paleo-Christian relics, into movable, marketable, and highly sought-after collector's items. Led by primary and visual sources, we will (virtually) follow diggers down into excavation tunnels; we will learn how antiquarians procured the best pieces available on the market and negotiated a fair price; we will ask collectors to open their palaces for us and guide us through their assemblages of antiquities and relics. Meanwhile, restorers will teach us how they turned disfigured fragments into sensuous statues of Venus, and forgers how they created fakes that looked genuine and fooled even the best antiquarians of the time.

Lecturer's Biography

Dr Barbara Furlotti is Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld. She has held post–doctoral fellowships at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Warburg Institute in London, the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. She has published extensively on the history of collecting, display practices and the art market. Her current book project focusses on antiquarian forgeries and restoration practices in Renaissance Italy. She co–curated the exhibitions Giulio Romano: Art and Desire (Mantua, Palazzo Te, 2019–2020) and Giulio Romano: the Power of Things on Renaissance Design (Mantua, Palazzo Te, ). Her next exhibition on the concept of nature in Renaissance court culture will take place in Mantua in the autumn of 2026.

Tuition Fees

The tuition fee for the course "Digging up the Past: Collecting Antiquities and Paleo-Christian Relics in Early-Modern Rome" is £245. Please note that new VAT rules for online courses came into effect in the EU in 2025, which means that EU participants will be charged their local VAT rate. VAT-inclusive prices for EU students will be displayed at check-out.