If you're keen to get going before you arrive, here are some suggested books to read.

James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (London: John Murray, 1991)

Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)

Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006)

Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (London: Penguin, 1993; first published 1955)

Niklaus Pevsner, An Introduction to European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)

Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972)

Mary Beard and John Henderson, Classical Art, from Greece to Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Nicola Coldstream, Medieval Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)

Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)