| Art Periods/Movements |
Characteristics |
Chief Artists and Major Works |
Historical Events |
| Stone Age (30,000 BCEE–2500 BCEE) |
Cave painting, fertility goddesses, megalithic structures |
Lascaux Cave Painting, Woman of Willendorf, Stonehenge |
Ice Age ends (10,000 BCE–8,000 BCE); New Stone Age and first permanent settlements (8000 BCE–2500 BCE) |
| Mesopotamian (3500 BCE–539 BCE) |
Warrior art and narration in stone relief |
Standard of Ur, Gate of Ishtar, Stele of Hammurabi’s Code |
Sumerians invent writing (3400 BCE); Hammurabi writes his law code (1780 BCE); Abraham founds monotheism |
| Egyptian (3100 BCE–30 BCE) |
Art with an afterlife focus: pyramids and tomb painting |
Imhotep, Step Pyramid, Great Pyramids, Bust of Nefertiti |
Narmer unites Upper/Lower Egypt (3100 BCE); Rameses II battles the Hittites (1274 BCE); Cleopatra dies (30 BCE) |
| Greek and Hellenistic (850 BCE–31 BCE) |
Greek idealism: balance, perfect proportions; architectural orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) |
Parthenon, Myron, Phidias, Polykleitos, Praxiteles, statues of Kritios Boy, Discobolus, Laocoön and His Sons, Venus de Milo |
Athens defeats Persia at Marathon (490 BCE); Peloponnesian Wars (431 BCE–404 BCE); Alexander the Great’s conquests (336 BCE–323 BCE) |
| Roman (500 BCE–CE 476) |
Roman realism: practical and down-to-earth; the arch |
Augustus of Primaporta, Colosseum, Pantheon, Trajan’s Column |
Julius Caesar assassinated (44 BCE); Augustus proclaimed Emperor (27 BCE); Diocletian splits Empire (CE 292); Rome falls (CE 476) |
| Byzantine and Islamic (CE 476–1453) |
Heavenly Byzantine mosaics; Islamic architecture and amazing mazelike design |
Hagia Sophia, Andrei Rublev, Mosque of Cordoba, the Alhambra |
Justinian partly restores Western Roman Empire (CE 533–CE 562); Iconoclasm Controversy (CE 726–CE 843); Birth of Islam (CE 610) and Muslim Conquests (CE 632–CE 732) |
| Middle Ages (500–1400) |
Celtic art, Carolingian Renaissance, Romanesque, Gothic |
St. Sernin, Durham Cathedral, Notre Dame, Chartres; Cimabue, Duccio; Giotto |
Viking raids (793–1066); Battle of Hastings (1066); Crusades I–IV (1095–1204); Black Death (1347–1351); Hundred Years War (1337–1453) |
| Early and High Renaissance (1400–1550) |
Rebirth of classical culture |
Ghiberti’s Doors, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo |
Gutenberg invents movable type (1447); Turks conquer Constantinople (1453); Columbus lands in New World (1492); Martin Luther starts Reformation (1517) |
| Venetian and Northern Renaissance (1430–1550) |
The Renaissance spreads northward to France, the Low Countries, Poland, Germany, and England |
Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Dürer, Bruegel, Bosch, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden |
Council of Trent and Counter Reformation (1545–1563); Copernicus proves the earth revolves around the sun (1543) |
| Mannerism (1527–1580) |
Art that breaks the rules; artifice over nature |
Tintoretto, El Greco, Pontormo, Bronzino, Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana |
Magellan circumnavigates the globe (1520–1522) |
| Baroque (1600–1750) |
Splendor and flourish for God; art as a weapon in the religious wars |
Reubens, Rembrandt, Hals, Caravaggio, Artemesia Gentileschi, Elisabetta Sirani, Judith Leyster,Velázquez Palace of Versailles |
Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants (1618–1648) |
| Neoclassical (1750–1850) |
Art that recaptures Greco-Roman grace and grandeur |
David, Ingres, Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kaufmann, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Labille-Guiard, Canova, Houdon |
Enlightenment (18th century); Industrial Revolution (1760–1850) |
| Romanticism (1780–1850) |
The triumph of imagination and individuality |
Caspar Friedrich, Gericault, Delacroix, Turner, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Goya |
American Revolution (1775–1783); French Revolution (1789–1799); Napoleon crowned emperor of France (1803) |
| Realism, Hudson River School, Pre-Raphaelites, The Ten, Ashcan School (1848–1910) |
Celebrating working class and peasants; en plein air rustic painting |
Corot, Courbet, Daumier, Bonheur, Millet, Cole, Durand, Bierstadt, Catlin, Homer, Eakins, Rossetti, Spartali Stillman, Millais, Dewing, Tarbell, Benson, Sloan, Luks |
European democratic revolutions of 1848; Westward expansion of the United States, California Gold Rush of 1849. |
| Impressionism (1869–1885) |
Capturing fleeting effects of natural light |
Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cassatt, Morisot, Degas, Chase, Hassam, Frieseke, Peterson |
Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871); Unification of Germany (1871) |
| Post-Impressionism (1886–1892) |
A soft revolt against Impressionism |
Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat, Ensor, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin |
Belle Époque (late-19th-century Golden Age); Japan defeats Russia (1905) |
| Fauvism and Expressionism (1905–1939) |
Harsh colors and flat surfaces (Fauvism); emotion distorting form |
Matisse, Derain, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Gabriel Münter, Franz Marc, Käthe Kollwitz, Gustav Klimt, Egon Shiele |
Boxer Rebellion in China (1900); World War I (1914–1918) |
| Cubism, Futurism, Supremativism, Constructivism, De Stijl, Precisionism, Harlem Renaissance (1905–1944) |
Pre– and Post–World War I art experiments: new forms to express modern life |
Picasso, Braque, Leger, Boccioni, Severini, Malevich, Tatlin, Gabo, Mondrian, O’Keeffe, Demuth, Sheeler, Douglas, Johnson, Savage |
Russian Revolution (1917); American women franchised (1920) |
| Dada and Surrealism, Modernist Architecture (1917–1950) |
Mock art; painting dreams and exploring the unconscious |
Duchamp, Dalí, Ernst, Magritte, Miro, Kahlo, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier |
Disillusionment after World War I; Great Depression (1929–1938); World War II (1939–1945) and Nazi horrors; atomic bombs dropped on Japan (1945) |
| Abstract Expressionism (1940s–1950s) and Pop Art (1960s) |
Post–World War II: pure abstraction and expression without form; popular art absorbs consumerism |
Gorky, Pollock, Krasner, de Kooning, Rothko, Warhol, Close, Lichtenstein, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann |
Cold War and Vietnam War (U.S. enters 1965); U.S.S.R. suppresses Hungarian revolt (1956) and Czechoslovakian revolt (1968) |
| Postmodernism and Deconstructivism (1970–) |
Art without a center and reworking and mixing past styles |
Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Anselm Kiefer, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Judy Chicago, Smithson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, ORLAN, James Turrell, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson |
Nuclear freeze movement; Cold War fizzles; Communism collapses in Eastern Europe and U.S.S.R. (1989–1991), Iraq wars, climate change, rise of populism and autocracies |
