Discovering Beauty Through Art
“This week at school, we’ve been talking about dragons and legends while listening to Carmina Burana.” This could well be what an MYP 1 student tells her parents when she gets home. And she would be right. This academic year, we have launched a cultural project designed to bring our students closer to the beauty of art.
It is all part of the same learning experience: the Interdisciplinary Cultural Project invites students to discover a different painting each week from four different perspectives: art, history, music and philosophy.
The Interdisciplinary Cultural Project – Discovering Beauty Through Art takes students on a twelve-week journey through different periods and artistic styles, from the Early Renaissance to the beginning of the 20th century. Along the way, it explores some of the great themes of human experience: love and self-giving, loneliness, identity, childhood, joy, justice, the passage of time and the search for transcendence.
One painting, four subjects: History, Art History, Music and Philosophy
Each week begins with a painting. One day, students explore it from the perspective of Art History; another day, through History; then through Music; and finally through Philosophy. Four thirty-minute sessions allow them to return to the same work of art with different questions and to make connections between ideas that have been part of the human experience throughout history.
When looking at Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, for example, students not only enter the world of 15th-century Florence, but also consider the consequences of truly loving someone and connect these ideas with Schubert’s Ave Maria.
“With Uccello’s painting Saint George and the Dragon, we don’t simply describe what we see. We help students explore ideas such as the human condition, weakness and the triumph over chaos — themes that we also encounter in Carmina Burana,” explains Ana Pérez Muñoz, Head of the Arts Department at Alegra and the teacher responsible for the project. “Learning how to look at a painting is learning how to look at reality.”
Learning to look in order to discover beauty
Little by little, the paintings cease to be isolated images or simply names to remember. Behind each one emerges a historical period, a way of thinking, historical events, music, questions and people.
This approach is closely connected to Alegra’s educational methodology, which helps students make connections between areas of knowledge that they would normally study separately and gain a deeper understanding of how they relate to one another. Here, those connections begin with something as simple as stopping in front of a painting and starting to ask questions. Are legends untrue? Entirely untrue? What deeper truth lies behind this myth?
The teacher explains to the students: “The painting helps us to explore higher realities. Here, for example, we have a physical image: Saint George, depicted as a strong, protective warrior saving a princess from the dragon. But the image leads us to consider a higher reality. Legends are a way for truth to endure for centuries and centuries…”
“So, I imagine Saint George is like God and the dragon is like Satan. Could that be the case?” one of the girls asks her teacher.
Through a Christian lens
The twelve themes included in the project have been selected in keeping with the school’s Christian ethos.
- Respecting the dignity of every person as an image of God, something that can be recognised in every face depicted in the works of art.
- Contemplating beauty as a reflection of the transcendent: art is not merely decorative, but a path towards truth.
- Cultivating virtue: justice, fortitude, prudence and temperance are embodied in the figures, works and thinkers explored throughout the programme.
- Integrating faith and reason through thinkers from the Christian tradition, including Thomas Aquinas, Edith Stein, Romano Guardini, Pascal, Newman, Pieper, Hildegard of Bingen and Chesterton.
- Educating the eye: learning how to look at a painting is learning how to look at reality.
Culture and reading throughout the academic year
The Cultural Project does not end here. Once the MYP 1 students have completed these twelve weeks, they will begin their Spanish History Reading Programme. Meanwhile, MYP 2 students are currently immersed in the Reading Programme, and in the second term it will be their turn to explore art, music, history and philosophy through the Cultural Project.
In this way, year after year, the two projects alternate, accompanying students throughout the academic year.
