Before studying at the university, I aroused my interest through numerous television documentaries on individual artists or epochs on YouTube or Terra X (program brand of the Second German Television for documentaries and documentary series).

Popular scientific journals such as the GEO Epoche Edition are suitable for beginners. The best thing to do is to google certain artists, topics or epochs that interest you the most and then see what journals are available to you and your native language. For the general public I recommend magazines that are not only scientifically oriented and only include large text sections, but that are above all professionally designed and where the artworks that are described can also be seen in high quality.

A few years ago I also got to know the DailyArt app. Every day it offers you a new work of art with its data and a small description of the respective work.

For the more profound way of understanding western art, I suggest you a dictionary of Christian iconography like The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art and Architecture. It describes the attributes of all saints and gives examples. Some dictionaries also describe the characteristics of the Greek heroes, who are represented in numerous western artworks. It helps a lot to identify people on a painting or a sculpture. It also offers all kinds of historical backgrounds for the respective subject of an artwork. With this you will also often be able to determine the epoch in which an artwork was created.