In a world that is becoming increasingly more visual, there is a greater need to educate children to better understand images. A school subject that deals directly with image understanding is visual arts. This article discusses an interdisciplinary approach to promote art understanding, within a multimodal environment that combines art and music. The approach was tested with pre-service elementary school teachers (experimental and control group). The target group is of special interest because, in many countries, generalist-teachers and not art-specialists teach art in elementary schools. The findings indicated that when art viewing was accompanied by musical stimulus (experimental group), viewers/listeners were able to exhibit a variety of art appreciation skills and to move to elaborated responses to the artworks. The findings have implications for teacher-training courses as they suggest ways of enhancing future teachers' art-appreciation skills and set a framework for developing multimodal educational material for art viewing activities.