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Period: 300 to Jan 1, 1400
Medieval
During the Early Middle Ages, the Catholic Church financed many projects, and the oldest examples of Christian art survive in the Roman catacombs, or burial crypts beneath the city. By 350 AD, the Church had two power centers, Rome in the West and Constantinople in the East. Medieval artists decorated churches and works for public appreciation using classical themes. The Gothic style developed in the middle of the twelfth century and is named after the Goths who ruled France. -
Jan 1, 1300
Madonna and Child
By Duccio di Buoninsegna -
Period: Jan 1, 1400 to Jan 1, 1500
Renaissance
The revival of classical learning and art. Centered at first in Florence, it marked the end of the Middle Ages and was the outstanding creative period in western art. Architecture, painting, and sculpture, deriving from Greek and Roman models, developed with an unparalleled vigor and prominence, and the artist gained a role in society hitherto unknown, mainly due to the rival city states that employed them. Artistic innovation included perspective and painting with oil. -
Period: Jan 1, 1430 to Jan 1, 1580
Northern Realism
Realism, in the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favour of a close observation of outward appearances. -
Jan 1, 1432
Ghent Altarpiece
By Hubert and Jan van Eyck -
Jan 1, 1495
The Last Supper
By Leonardo da Vinci -
Period: Jan 1, 1530 to Jan 1, 1580
Mannerism
An artistic style that predominated in Italy from the end of the High Renaissance in the 1520s to the beginnings of the Baroque style around 1590. The Mannerist style originated in Florence and Rome and spread to northern Italy and, ultimately, to much of central and northern Europe. Mannerism originated as a reaction to the harmonious classicism and the idealized naturalism of High Renaissance art as practiced by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael in the first two decades of the 16th century. -
Jan 1, 1532
The Prince
By Niccolò Machiavelli -
Jan 1, 1573
The Feast in the House of Levi
By Paolo Veronese -
Period: to
Baroque
a fairly complex idiom, originating in Rome, which flowered during the period c.1590-1720, and which embraced painting, and sculpture as well as architecture. After the idealism of the Renaissance, and the slightly 'forced' nature of Mannerism, Baroque art above all reflected the religious tensions of the age - notably the desire of the Catholic Church in Rome (as annunciated at the Council of Trent, 1545-63) to reassert itself in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. -
Triumph of the Immaculate
By Paolo De Matteis -
Period: to
Rococo
An artistic style that was characterized by fanciful curved asymmetrical forms and elaborate ornamentation. Also involves fancy curved forms and much decoration. -
Mr. and Mrs. Andrews
By Thomas Gainsborough -
Period: to
Neoclassicism
A style in architecture, decorative art, and fine art, based on the imitation of surviving classical models and types. Characterized by the introduction and widespread use of Greek orders and decorative motifs, the subordination of detail to simple, strongly geometric overall compositions, the presence of light colors or shades, frequent shallowness of relief in ornamental treatment of façades, and the absence of textural effects. -
Oath of the Horatii
By Jacques-Louis David -
Period: to
Romanticism
An artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual's expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions. -
Liberty Leading the People
By Eugène Delacroix -
Period: to
Victorian
The vibrant colors represented the high society of the picture of England which was shaped by the 64-year reign of Queen Victoria in the 19th century. Queen Victoria's reign saw a great expansion of the British Empire, which led to a high level of prosperity and social and fashion finery which was recorded in bright, emotional color. -
The Raven
By Edgar Allan Poe -
Period: to
Impressionism
A style of painting developed in the last third of the 19th century, characterized chiefly by short brush strokes of bright colors in immediate juxtaposition to represent the effect of light on objects. -
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
By Édouard Manet -
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain -
Flaming June
By Sir Frederic Leighton -
Period: to
Expressionism
Emerged as a response to a widespread anxiety about humanity's increasingly discordant relationship with the world and accompanying lost feelings of authenticity and spirituality. In part a reaction against Impressionism and academic art, Expressionism was inspired most heavily by the Symbolic currents in late nineteenth-century art. -
Period: to
Cubism
A style of painting and sculpture, characterized chiefly by an emphasis on formal structure, the reduction of natural forms to their geometrical equivalents, and the organization of the planes of a represented object independently of representational requirements. -
Period: to
Surrealism
An art style that sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Disdaining rationalism and literary realism, and powerfully influenced by psychoanalysis, the Surrealists believed the rational mind repressed the power of the imagination, weighting it down with taboos. Influenced also by Karl Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. -
Persistence of memory
By Salvador Dalí -
The Weeping Woman
By Pablo Picasso -
Period: to
Abstract Expressionism
A movement in experimental, nonrepresentational painting originating in the U.S., with sources in earlier movements, and embracing many individual styles marked in common by freedom of technique, a preference for dramatically large canvases, and a desire to give spontaneous expression to the unconscious. -
Woman III
By Willem de Kooning
