The History of Art

Although art history focuses on objects created by humans for spiritual, narrative, philosophical, symbolic, conceptual, documentary, ornamental as well as functional and other purposes, focuses on their aesthetic visual forms. Fine arts can be classified in several ways. Separate fine arts from applied arts.

Comprehensive focus on human creativity. Or focus on different media such as architecture, sculpture, painting, film, photography, and graphics. In recent years, technological advances have given rise to video art, computer art, performance art, animation, television, and video games.

Art history is often told as a chronology of the masterpieces created during each civilization. Therefore, it can be framed as the history of an advanced culture embodied in the wonders of the world. On the other hand, Mingei’s expression is also incorporated into art history narratives called Mingei and Kogei.

The more an art historian becomes involved in these latter forms of Law’s culture, the more he perceives his work as a study of visual and material culture, or as a contribution to art history disciplines such as anthropology and archaeology. more likely to. In the latter case, the work of art is sometimes called an archaeological relic.

Ancient Near East stretched from Turkey and the Mediterranean seaboard in the west to Iran and the Arabian peninsula in the east. Mesopotamia witnessed during the 4th millennium BC the emergence of the first cities and the earliest form of writing.

Egypt’s art was religious and symbolic. Egyptian art emphasized the religious concept of immortality. Later Egyptian art includes Coptic and Byzantine art.

The Harappan Civilization (c. 2400–1900 BC) is now recognized as extraordinarily advanced. Its sites span an area stretching from today’s northeast Afghanistan, through much of Pakistan, and into western and northwestern India. The most numerous artifacts are square and rectangular stamp seals and seal impressions.

The first metal objects produced in China were made almost 4000 years ago, during the Xia Dynasty (c.2100-1700 BC)

The power of Greek art lies in its representation of the human figure and its focus on human beings and the anthropomorphic gods as chief subjects. The artworks of the Greeks were meant to decorate temples and public buildings, to celebrate battle victories and commemorate the dead.

The Roman sculpture is often less idealized than its Greek precedents, being very realistic. Roman architecture often used concrete, and features such as the round arch and dome were invented.

Islam appeared in western Arabia in the 7th century AD through revelations delivered to the prophet Muhammad in Mecca. Within a century of Muhammad’s death, the Islamic empires controlled the Middle East, Spain, and parts of Asia and Africa.

The Olmecs (c.1400–400 BC) were the first major civilization in modern-day Mexico. They produced jade and ceramic figurines, colossal heads, and pyramids with temples at the top, all without the advantage of metal tools.

Gold body accessories were produced, many golden ones, but also many other ones made of tumbaga. Tumbaga is a non-specific alloy of gold and copper given by the Spanish Conquistadors.

The Paracas culture of the south coast of Peru is best known for its patterned textiles, particularly mantels. The Moche controlled the river valleys of the north coast, while the Nazca of southern Peru held sway along the coastal deserts and contiguous mountains.

Eastern art history divides the field by nation, with foci on Indian art, Chinese art, and Japanese art. In most of Asia, pottery was a prevalent form of art. Other forms of art were sculpture and painting.

Central Asia has always been a crossroads of cultural exchange, the hub of the so-called Silk Road. The Silk Road transmission of art, Scythian art, Greco-Buddhist art, Indian art, and more recently Persianate culture are all part of this complicated history.

The major survivors of Buddhist art began in the period after the Mauryans, within North India Kushan art, the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, and the “classic” period of Gupta art. Good quantities of sculpture survive from some key sites such as Sanchi, Bharhut, and Amaravati.

Chinese art is one of the oldest continuous traditional arts in the world. The media that have usually been classified in the West since the Renaissance as the decorative arts are extremely important in Chinese art.

The earliest complex art in Japan was produced in the 7th and 8th centuries in connection with Buddhism. In the 9th century, the Japanese began to turn away from China and develop indigenous forms of expression. The secular arts became increasingly important until the late 15th century.

The most significant arts venue in Africa is the Johannesburg Biennale. Sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by a high density of cultures. Notable are the Dogon people from Mali, Edo, Yoruba, Igbo people, and the Nok civilization.

The Art of Oceania includes the geographic areas of Micronesia, Polynesia, Australia, New Zealand, and Melanesia. It is one of the longest continuous traditions of art in the world, dating back at least fifty millennia.

With the decline of the Roman Empire in c. 300 AD, the Medieval era began, lasting for about a millennium. Early Christian art begins the period, followed by Byzantine art, Anglo-Saxon art, Viking art, and Ottonian art.

Byzantine art refers to the body of Christian Greek artistic products of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. Many Eastern Orthodox states in Eastern Europe preserved many aspects of the empire’s culture and art for centuries afterward. Surviving Byzantine art is mostly religious and with exceptions at certain periods is highly conventionalized.

Romanesque churches are characterized by rigid articulation and geometric clarity. The architecture is austere but enlivened by decorative sculpting of capitals and portals. The period saw a resurgence of monumental stone structures with complex structural programs.

Gothic art developed in Northern France out of Romanesque in the 12th century AD, and led by the concurrent development of Gothic architecture. It spread to all of Western Europe, and much of Southern and Central Europe, never quite effacing more classical styles in Italy.

The Early Renaissance was a period of great creative and intellectual activity when artists broke away from the parameters of Byzantine art. It is generally accepted that it started in Florence in present-day Italy in the early 15th century.

The name may derive from ‘Barocco’, the Portuguese word for misshaped pearl, and it describes art that combined emotion, dynamism, and drama with powerful color, realism, and strong tonal contrasts. The Baroque and its late variant the Rococo were the first truly global styles in the arts.

Rococo is characterized by natural motifs, soft colors, curving lines, asymmetry, and themes including love, nature, and light-hearted entertainment. The name of the movement derives from the French ‘rocaille’, or pebble, and refers to stones and shells that decorate the interiors of caves.

Neoclassicism dominates Western art from the mid to late 18th century until the 1830s. Embracing order and restraint, it developed in reaction to the perceived frivolity, hedonism, and decadence of Rococo and exemplifying the rational thinking of the ‘Age of Enlightenment

Many art historians place the origins of modern art in the late 18th century, others in the mid-19th century. The invention of photography in the 1830s further altered certain aspects of art, particularly painting.

Romanticism emerged in the late 18th century and flourished in the first half of the 19th century. It grew from a disillusionment with the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The concept of the “natural” English garden was adopted throughout Europe and America in the following decades.

The values of academism were situated in the center of the Enlightenment project of discovering the basic principles and ideals of art. Academic art is closely related to Beaux-Arts architecture, which developed in the same place and holds to a similar classicizing ideal.

The Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic first appeared in the mid-18th century in a few houses in England, like the Strawberry Hill House in London. Between 1830 and 1840, a taste and nostalgia for the rediscovery of past styles developed under the influence of romanticism.

Realism emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, c. 1840, and had counterparts in sculpture, literature, and drama. Artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Honoré Daumier had loose associations with realism.

Impressionism emerged in France, under the influences of Realism, the Barbizon School, and en plein air painters like Eugène Boudin, Camille Corot, Charles- Francois Daubigny, and Johan Barthold Jongkind.

Symbolism emerged in France and Belgium in the 3rd quarter of the nineteenth century and spread throughout Europe in the 1870s. In architecture, the applied arts, and decorative arts symbolism closely paralleled and overlapped with Art Nouveau.

Post-Impressionism is a rather imprecise term applied to a diverse generation of artists. In its strictest sense, it pertains to four highly influential artists: Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh.

The art movements of Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, abstract art, Dadaism, and Surrealism led to further explorations of new styles and manners of expression. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.

Art Nouveau (French: new art) was an international and widespread art and design movement that emerged in the final decades of the 19th century until the First World War in 1914. It was catapulted into international prominence with the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Fauvism emerged from post-impressionism, gradually developing into the first major movement of the 20th century. Its genesis was in 1895 when Henri Matisse entered the studio of Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Expressionist painting is characterized by loose, spontaneous, frequently thick, impasto brushwork. It often conveyed how the artist felt about their subject, as opposed to what it looked like. Several groups and factions of expressionists appeared at various times and places.

Picasso, Braque, and other Cubist artists were inspired by sculptures of Iberia, Africa and Oceania exhibited in the Louvre and the Trocadéro.

The style was named after the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in Paris in 1925. Its exuberance and fantasy captured the spirit of the ‘roaring 20s’ and provided an escape from the realities of the Great Depression during the 1930s.

Surrealism emerged as a faction of Dada, formally announcing its inception in 1924 with André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism. The small and short-lived Metaphysical School (c. 1910–1921), with Giorgio de Chirico as its principal figure, was highly influential on surrealism.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Abstract Expressionism emerged as the first specifically American art movement to have an international impact.