History of Art

The oldest known figurative art: hundreds of animals painted deep in a French cave with astonishing skill, some 32,000 years ago.

A palm-sized limestone figurine of a woman, one of many Ice Age 'Venuses' whose exaggerated forms hint at fertility and the sacred.

Vast galleries of bulls, horses, and deer painted in ochre and charcoal — the 'Sistine Chapel of prehistory' in south-west France.

Monumental carved stone pillars raised before agriculture — the earliest known ritual architecture, decorated with animal reliefs.

A carved slate tablet celebrating Egypt's unification, its rigid registers and profile figures setting the conventions of Egyptian art for millennia.

A colossal lion-bodied guardian with a pharaoh's head, carved from living bedrock — Egyptian monumental sculpture at its most enduring.

A painted limestone portrait of the Egyptian queen whose serene naturalism marks the brief, radical Amarna style.

Rigid, frontal marble youths, influenced by Egypt, that begin the Greek quest to render the ideal human body in stone.

The greatest sculptor of classical Athens, who oversaw the Parthenon's sculpture and made the colossal gold-and-ivory statue of Zeus.

The 'Spear-Bearer' embodied Polykleitos's Canon of ideal proportion — the classical rule-book for the perfect human figure.

A writhing Hellenistic marble group of a priest and his sons crushed by serpents — anguish and movement that stunned the Renaissance when rediscovered.

Buried by Vesuvius and preserved for centuries, Pompeii's wall paintings reveal the colour, illusion, and sophistication of Roman art.

Justinian's vast domed church in Constantinople, its golden interior seeming to float on light — the summit of Byzantine architecture.

Shimmering gold-ground mosaics of emperors and saints in San Vitale — Byzantine art's transcendent, otherworldly style at its height.

An Irish gospel manuscript of dazzling interlaced ornament — the masterpiece of medieval illumination.

A seventy-metre embroidered frieze narrating the Norman conquest of England — a rare secular epic in medieval art.

At Saint-Denis, pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and vast stained glass launch the Gothic — architecture as a vision of heavenly light.

The Florentine painter who gave figures weight, emotion, and space, breaking Byzantine flatness and opening the road to the Renaissance.

Duccio's monumental altarpiece for Siena, blending Byzantine gold with a new tenderness — the glory of the Sienese school.

The Flemish master of oil paint, whose microscopic realism and luminous colour made him the founder of Northern Renaissance painting.

The vast unsupported dome of Florence Cathedral, an engineering marvel that announced the confidence and genius of the Renaissance.

The Florentine painter of The Birth of Venus and Primavera, whose flowing linear grace embodied the Neoplatonic spirit of the Medici court.

The archetypal Renaissance genius — painter of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and a restless investigator of nature, anatomy, and light.

The German master of engraving and woodcut who fused Northern precision with Italian theory and made the printed image high art.

Sculptor of the David and painter of the Sistine ceiling, whose heroic figures set the standard of the High Renaissance for centuries.

The painter of serene harmony and grace, whose School of Athens fresco is the visual summary of Renaissance humanism.

The supreme Venetian colourist, whose loose, glowing brushwork and sensuous colour transformed oil painting for all who followed.

Michelangelo's four-year fresco of Creation, its Adam reaching toward God among the most famous images ever painted.

The revolutionary who painted saints as ragged commoners under harsh, theatrical light — his tenebrism transformed European painting.

The exuberant Flemish master of dynamic, fleshy, large-scale canvases, whose vast workshop supplied the courts of Europe.

The genius of Baroque sculpture and architecture, who made marble breathe and gave Rome its most theatrical fountains and colonnades.

Court painter to the Spanish king, whose Las Meninas is a dazzling meditation on illusion, vision, and the act of painting itself.

The Dutch master of light, shadow, and inward human feeling, whose portraits and self-portraits probe the soul like no other.

The Delft painter of quiet, light-filled domestic interiors, whose small, radiant canvases turn ordinary moments into eternity.

Louis XIV's colossal palace and gardens, the total artwork of absolute monarchy and the model of Baroque grandeur across Europe.

The inventor of the fête galante, whose delicate, wistful scenes of aristocratic leisure launched the airy elegance of the Rococo.

The Spanish painter who moved from court portraits to the nightmares of war and reason's sleep, a bridge to modern art's darkness.

The leader of Neoclassicism, whose severe, heroic canvases served the ideals of the French Revolution and the empire of Napoleon.

The Japanese master of the woodblock print, whose Great Wave off Kanagawa would help ignite the West's fascination with Japanese art.

The German Romantic of solitary figures before vast, misty landscapes — nature as a mirror of the soul and the infinite.

The English painter of storms, steam, and dissolving light, whose late works verge on abstraction decades before the moderns.

The English painter of clouds, fields, and English weather, whose fresh naturalism deeply influenced French landscape painting.

The great French Romantic of colour and movement, whose Liberty Leading the People became the emblem of revolutionary passion.

The scandalous forerunner of modern painting, whose flat, frank canvases like Olympia broke with academic illusion and subject.

The 'father of modern art', who rebuilt nature from planes and structure and pointed the way straight to Cubism.

The leader of Impressionism, who painted the same haystacks, cathedrals, and water lilies again and again to capture light in time.

The Post-Impressionist of turbulent colour and feeling, unknown in life, whose expressive brushwork changed the course of painting.

A pioneer of pure abstraction, who freed colour and form from any object and likened painting to music.

The leader of Fauvism and master of pure colour and line, whose late cut-outs distilled a lifetime into joyful, radical simplicity.

The Paris movement that abandoned the studio for open-air light, loose brushwork, and the fleeting instant — the birth of modern art.

The restless titan of twentieth-century art, co-inventor of Cubism, whose Guernica and endless reinventions defined the modern age.

The provocateur whose 'readymades' — an ordinary urinal signed as Fountain — asked whether art is object or idea, launching conceptualism.

Picasso and Braque shattered the single viewpoint, showing objects from many angles at once — the most radical break in Western painting.

The painter of vast, glowing rectangles of colour meant to envelop the viewer in silence, tragedy, and the sublime.

The pioneer of 'drip' painting, who laid canvas on the floor and flung paint in rhythmic webs — action painting made pure energy.

The high priest of Pop, who silk-screened soup cans and celebrities and made the artist a brand and a mirror of consumer culture.

The Japanese artist of polka dots, mirrors, and infinity rooms, whose immersive installations made contemporary art a global spectacle.

The first American movement to lead world art — vast, gestural, and emotional canvases that made New York the new capital of painting.

The Neo-Expressionist who rose from New York graffiti to raw, word-strewn canvases about race, history, and power.

The movement that took its images from advertising, comics, and the supermarket, dissolving the line between high art and mass culture.

Stripped to plain geometric forms and industrial materials, Minimalism removed the artist's hand and left only pure presence.