From the bison of the caves to a portrait painted by AI
Pictures came before writing. People painted animals on cave walls and carved small figurines. Why they did it we cannot know; explanations such as hunting magic are only guesses.
One of the oldest pictures of animals.
A painting of a wild pig found in a cave on Sulawesi in Indonesia has been dated to more than 45,000 years ago. The discovery overturned the long-held idea that art began in Europe.
Lions and horses shaped by the curves of the rock.
Though more than 30,000 years old, the paintings of Chauvet Cave in France convey movement with overlapping lines and use the bulges of the rock to create depth. Art was not clumsy even at the beginning.
A palm-sized figure of a woman.
Found in Austria, this limestone figure about 11 cm tall exaggerates a full, rounded body. Many interpret it as a symbol of fertility, but its exact meaning is unknown.
The Sistine Chapel of prehistory.
Discovered by chance by boys in 1940, Lascaux Cave in France holds paintings of hundreds of animals, bison, horses and deer among them. When visitors' breath began damaging the paintings, the cave was closed in 1963, and visitors now see a replica.
Egyptian art had strict rules. Artists drew not what they saw but each part in the form most easily recognized: they painted what they knew. The style barely changed for nearly 3,000 years.
The rules of Egyptian art appear.
This stone slab shows the king who united Upper and Lower Egypt with head and legs in profile and eye and torso facing front. The king is drawn much larger than the other figures, because size showed rank, not real height.
War and peace in horizontal bands.
A box from the royal tombs of Ur in Mesopotamia is inlaid in shell and lapis lazuli with scenes of war and of a banquet, arranged in several horizontal bands. It is an early example of telling a story through pictures in sequence.
Architecture and sculpture for eternity.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu was the tallest human-made structure in the world for more than 3,800 years. Its sculptures and paintings were not for viewing but for the dead king's eternal life, and human proportions were strictly fixed on a grid.
A brief exception to 3,000 years of rules.
The Amarna art of the reign of Akhenaten, who attempted a religious reform, broke briefly from the strict Egyptian style, depicting the royal family naturally, with elongated faces and soft bodies. The painted bust of Queen Nefertiti is its masterpiece.
Gold asleep for 3,000 years.
The tomb of Tutankhamun, a pharaoh who died young, was found almost unlooted by Howard Carter in 1922. His funerary mask of gold and gems became the emblem of Egyptian art.
In Greece began, for the first time, a race toward depicting the world as the eye sees it. Stiff statues became breathing bodies within a century, and ideal proportions were set down in numbers.
A young man standing as upright as an Egyptian.
Statues of young men in Archaic Greece stand facing forward, left foot advanced and arms at their sides, in a pose much like Egyptian sculpture. The "Archaic smile" on their lips is their hallmark.
A body with its weight on one leg.
Classical sculpture conveyed living bodies through contrapposto, weight resting on one leg and the other relaxed. Polykleitos wrote the Canon, setting the ideal proportions of the human body in numbers, and demonstrated them in his Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer).
Architecture that corrects for optical illusion.
The Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis tilts its columns slightly inward and swells them gently in the middle, correcting optical illusions so they look straight and solid from afar. The sculptor Phidias oversaw its sculptural decoration.
The first life-size female nude statue.
Praxiteles caused a sensation by sculpting Aphrodite nude, about to bathe, and the work became the prototype for countless female nudes. The original is lost; only Roman copies survive.
An army of 8,000, life-size.
The clay soldiers made to guard the tomb of Qin Shi Huang in China each have a different face and hairstyle. They were found in 1974 by farmers digging a well.
The goddess of victory alighting into the wind.
Hellenistic sculpture replaced the calm balance of the Classical period with dramatic movement and emotion. The winged goddess alighting on a ship's prow and the Laocoön group, writhing in the coils of serpents, are its masterpieces.
Rome diligently copied Greek sculpture while making realistic portraits that recorded every wrinkle and wart. With concrete and the arch it built vast interior spaces.
Roman daily life preserved by volcanic ash.
Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, preserved the frescoes that decorated the walls of its houses. They even used illusionistic techniques, painted windows and columns that made rooms seem larger.
Faces of people from 2,000 years ago.
In Roman Egypt, portraits of the dead painted on wooden panels were placed over the faces of mummies. These vivid faces, painted with pigment mixed in wax, show that realistic portraiture already existed in antiquity.
A war story wound in a spiral.
On a column 30 m tall, the story of the Dacian campaigns spirals upward in a band 200 m long. With more than 2,500 figures, it is a giant "comic strip in stone."
A concrete dome 1,900 years old.
Light enters Rome's Pantheon through an opening (the oculus) at the top of its 43-meter dome. It is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
The realism of Greece and Rome was deliberately abandoned, because the aim was to show not the visible world but the spiritual one. Golden mosaics and stained glass made light a symbol of God.
A dome that seems to hang from heaven.
In the church the emperor Justinian built in Constantinople, the windows beneath the dome form a ring of light that makes the dome seem to float in the air. For nearly a thousand years it was the largest church in the world.
An emperor gazing forward against gold.
Justinian, Empress Theodora and their courts stand flat in a row against a gold background, staring straight ahead. Without shadow or depth, they seem to exist outside time, a hallmark of Byzantine art.
May holy images be made?
In the Byzantine Empire, a movement arguing that icons were idolatry destroyed and banned sacred images for more than a century. It was a fierce debate over what images can and may represent.
Endless patterns interlaced on a single page.
This Gospel manuscript made by Irish monks fills its pages with Celtic patterns of animals and vines endlessly intertwined. It is considered the supreme masterpiece of medieval manuscript illumination.
A tiny figure before an enormous mountain.
Fan Kuan of the Northern Song conveyed nature's grandeur with a huge mountain dominating the picture and travelers drawn tiny beneath it. Song landscape painting made landscape the central subject of painting far earlier than in the West.
A conquest told in 70 meters of embroidery.
The Norman conquest of England in 1066 was recorded in embroidery on a cloth about 70 m long. Its scenes run continuously from left to right, much like a modern comic.
Thin walls, big windows, filled with light.
Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis wanted to fill his church with light. Pointed arches, rib vaults and flying buttresses that brace the walls from outside made it possible to thin the walls and fill them with vast stained glass. Notre-Dame and Chartres Cathedral followed.
In Italy, weight, emotion and space returned to flat figures. Painting began to tell human stories, not only the stories of the divine world.
Painted figures regain weight and feeling.
Covering the walls of a chapel in Padua with stories from the Bible, Giotto gave his figures solid bulk and emotions such as grief, and painted them as if standing in real space. He is considered the painter who opened the door to the Renaissance.
Siena's golden altarpiece.
Keeping the gold backgrounds of the Byzantine tradition, Duccio painted a huge altarpiece that combined gentle figures with narrative scenes. Citizens are said to have carried the finished painting to the cathedral in procession.
Painting a city and fields instead of saints.
In frescoes for Siena's town hall, Ambrogio Lorenzetti contrasted the lively streets and fields of a well-governed city with the ruin under bad government. It is an early example of painting carrying a political message and a landscape rather than a religious subject.
In Florence, linear perspective, in which receding parallel lines meet at a single point, was invented, while in northern Europe oil paint rendered textures with extreme precision. Art acquired the language of mathematics and science.
A vanishing point proved with a mirror.
Brunelleschi demonstrated linear perspective with a painted panel of the Florence Baptistery: through a hole in its back, a viewer could compare the painting reflected in a mirror with the real building. He was also the architect who designed the huge dome of Florence Cathedral (completed in 1436).
A painting that seems to open a hole in the wall.
Masaccio was the first to apply perspective fully to painting, making a flat church wall seem to hold a deep chapel. He died at 26, but his work became a textbook for later painters.
An entire room reflected in a convex mirror.
Jan van Eyck perfected the technique of mixing pigment with oil and painted the textures of fur, metal and glass with extreme precision. In the small convex mirror on the wall, the room and even figures in the doorway are reflected. Two years earlier he had completed the Ghent Altarpiece with his brother.
A picture is a window open onto the world.
Alberti set out Brunelleschi's perspective geometrically in a book. His idea of the picture as an "open window" became the basic premise of Western painting for the next 500 years. The study of perspective later led to Desargues's projective geometry: art gave birth to a branch of mathematics.
The first freestanding nude bronze since antiquity.
Donatello made a life-size nude bronze standing alone on a pedestal, reviving the tradition of Greek and Roman sculpture after nearly a thousand years.
Painter and mathematician.
Piero della Francesca, who built mathematically precise spaces in works such as The Flagellation of Christ, was also a mathematician who wrote treatises on perspective and geometry.
A pagan goddess painted again after a thousand years.
In the Florence of the Medici, Botticelli painted Venus standing on a shell in graceful lines. Painting Greek mythology rather than a Christian subject on a large canvas showed a new interest in antiquity.
Christ at the vanishing point.
Painted on the refectory wall of a Milan monastery, the work is composed so that every perspective line converges on Christ's head. But because of the experimental technique Leonardo used, the paint began flaking almost as soon as it was finished.
Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael took the Renaissance to its height. After perfect balance was achieved came Mannerism, which deliberately distorted proportion and made space unsettling.
A bizarre imagined world.
The Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch filled three panels, paradise, a world of pleasure and hell, with hundreds of strange figures and creatures. Four hundred years later the Surrealists claimed him as a forerunner.
Outlines blurred like mist.
Leonardo painted a subtle smile using sfumato, softening outlines like mist. He kept the painting with him and reworked it for the rest of his life. His notebooks, studying anatomy, optics and machines, show him as both artist and scientist.
Freeing the giant trapped in the marble.
Still in his twenties, Michelangelo carved a David more than 5 m tall from a huge block of marble other sculptors had given up on. It became a symbol of the liberty of the Florentine Republic.
The philosophers of antiquity in one space.
In this fresco in the Vatican's papal palace, Raphael arranged the scholars of antiquity, Pythagoras, Euclid and more, around Plato and Aristotle in a majestic architectural space. Plato's face is said to resemble Leonardo's. It is regarded as the height of harmony and balance.
Genesis, painted over four years looking straight up.
Michelangelo protested that he was a sculptor, but in the end he spent four years painting the story of Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The Creation of Adam, with fingers almost touching, is its most famous scene.
A magic square in an engraving.
The German Albrecht Dürer, who had learned perspective in Italy, even wrote a book on geometry. This engraving includes a 4×4 magic square whose rows, columns and diagonals all add up to 34, with the two middle cells of the bottom row giving the year of its making, 1514.
Building form with color rather than line.
Venice's Titian created the textures of skin and fabric with color and brushwork instead of outlines. He anchors one side of a long-running debate: Florentine line versus Venetian color.
Proportions twisted on purpose.
After the perfect balance of the Renaissance, Mannerist painters deliberately elongated the body and made space unsettling. Parmigianino's Madonna has, as the title says, an abnormally long neck.
The beginning of art history as a discipline.
Giorgio Vasari, painter and architect, wrote biographies of Italian artists from Giotto to Michelangelo and established for the first time a historical framework in which art develops. The idea of a "Renaissance," a rebirth, also took shape in his account.
Peasants and the seasons.
Pieter Bruegel of Flanders painted the daily life of peasants and the landscapes of the seasons instead of saints or nobles. Weary hunters and villagers playing on the ice spread out across a winter landscape.
The Baroque is an art of dramatic movement and light. The Catholic Church sponsored art that seized the emotions to counter the Reformation, while in the Protestant Netherlands citizens bought art and paintings of everyday life flourished.
A shaft of light cutting through darkness.
Using chiaroscuro, a strong light thrown into darkness, Caravaggio turned biblical scenes into moments of theater. He caused controversy by painting saints like ordinary people off the street, and his dramatic light spread to painters across Europe.
Dynamism surging along the diagonal.
Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens showed the dynamism of the Baroque in huge canvases of muscular figures straining along a diagonal. He was an international painter who ran a large workshop, and a diplomat as well.
The moment marble turns to leaves.
Bernini carved in marble the instant Daphne, fleeing Apollo, turns into a laurel tree. Leaves sprouting from her fingertips and feet turning into roots are hard to believe as stone.
A group portrait of a citizen militia.
Commissioned to paint a group portrait of an Amsterdam militia company, Rembrandt painted not a row of posed figures but the dramatic moment they set out. In the Netherlands, citizens rather than the Church became art's main patrons.
A state institution to teach and judge art.
Under Louis XIV, France founded the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture to systematize the teaching and judging of art. Its hierarchy of genres, with history painting at the top, and its official exhibition, the Salon, dominated French art for 200 years.
The viewer steps into the painting.
The painter in the picture looks out at us from behind his canvas, and the mirror at the back reflects the king and queen. Where we stand is where the king stands. It is a painting whose subject is the relationship between the viewer and the picture itself.
Quiet light seeping through a window.
Johannes Vermeer of Delft painted quiet interiors and figures in the soft light from a window. Only about thirty of his works survive, and some think he used a camera obscura.
The light, ornate Rococo of aristocratic salons was in fashion until, in the age of Enlightenment and revolution, Neoclassicism returned to the severity of antiquity. Royal collections were opened to citizens.
Aristocrats setting off for the island of love.
Watteau created a new genre, the fête galante, in which elegantly dressed lovers wander through dreamlike landscapes. This painting earned him admission to the Academy.
Playful, frothy aristocratic amusement.
A woman in a pink dress kicks off her shoe on a swing while her lover gazes up from the bushes. The painting embodies the light, sensual mood of the Rococo.
The severity of ancient Rome and civic virtue.
Jacques-Louis David painted Roman brothers swearing to fight for their country in firm lines and a clear composition. Abandoning Rococo frivolity for the severe style of antiquity to depict civic virtue, it was the manifesto of Neoclassicism. David later became deeply involved in the French Revolution.
The king's pictures belong to the people.
The French revolutionary government confiscated the royal collection and opened it to the public in the Louvre Palace. It became the model for the public museum, where anyone could come in and see art. The same year David completed The Death of Marat, depicting the assassinated revolutionary.
Romanticism arose, painting emotion over reason and the sublime power of nature, violence and madness over order. Then in 1839 a machine began doing what had been art's goal for 2,000 years: reproducing the world exactly.
A man with arms spread before the guns.
Goya painted Napoleon's troops executing citizens of Madrid with neither heroes nor glory. Counted among the first modern paintings to denounce the violence of war, it leads on to Picasso's Guernica.
A lone figure before sublime nature.
The German painter Caspar David Friedrich painted a man standing with his back to us atop a fog-wrapped peak. The awe felt before vast nature, the sublime, is the core emotion of Romanticism.
A real shipwreck on a giant canvas.
On a canvas more than 7 m wide, Géricault painted a real event: shipwreck survivors on a raft facing starvation and death. He prepared by studying corpses and survivors firsthand.
A flag on the barricade.
Commemorating the July Revolution of 1830 in France, Delacroix painted a goddess holding the tricolor and leading the people. Its violent color and movement, in contrast to David's severe line, are hallmarks of Romantic painting.
A Japanese woodblock print that shook Europe.
One of Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, it shows a tiny Mount Fuji behind a giant wave. Decades later, when Japanese prints flooded into Europe, their flat areas of color and bold compositions deeply influenced the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.
A machine captures the world as it is.
The French government made Daguerre's photographic process public, and in Britain Talbot announced his paper-negative process. A machine could now do better what had been art's central goal for 2,000 years: reproducing the world exactly. The history of art after this can be read as a response to that shock.
Painters leave the studio.
The American painter John Rand patented a way to store paint in tin tubes. Before that, paint was kept in pig bladders and was hard to carry. Portable paint let painters work outdoors, observing light directly.
A train racing through mist and light.
England's J.M.W. Turner painted a steam train speeding through the rain as a vortex of light and color in which form almost dissolves. His paintings of the speed of the industrial age and the effects of atmosphere anticipated Impressionism.
Realism, painting ordinary life, defied the Academy, and Impressionism painted the light of the moment rather than the object. The Post-Impressionism of the century's end split into three paths, form, emotion and symbol, that became the starting points of 20th-century art.
"Show me an angel and I'll paint one."
Courbet caused an uproar by painting an ordinary funeral of his home villagers on a huge canvas of the kind reserved for history painting. It was the manifesto of Realism, depicting the reality of workers and country people instead of idealized heroes.
An exhibition of the paintings the Salon rejected.
When so many works were rejected from the official Salon that discontent boiled over, Napoleon III ordered a separate "Salon of the Refused." Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, shown there, caused a scandal with its nude woman seated beside clothed gentlemen, and two years later his Olympia caused another.
A name taken from mockery.
Painters rejected by the Salon held their own exhibition, and a critic mocking Monet's Impression, Sunrise called them "Impressionists," giving the movement its name. They painted outdoors with quick brushstrokes, capturing light and color as they changed from moment to moment.
Dots painted by the science of color.
Instead of mixing paint, Seurat placed small dots of pure color side by side so that the colors would mix in the viewer's eye. It applied the color science of the day, complementary contrast and optical mixing, directly.
A swirling night sky.
Based on the view from his asylum window in Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted a swirling sky and flame-like cypresses with thick brushstrokes. His way of expressing emotion through color and brushwork rather than depicting objects accurately led to Expressionism. He sold almost no paintings in his lifetime.
Leaving civilization in search of the primitive and the symbolic.
Disgusted with European civilization, Gauguin went to Tahiti and painted symbolic pictures in flat areas of intense color. His primitivism influenced Fauvism and Cubism, but it is also criticized for its colonial gaze.
Painting inner anxiety.
Norway's Edvard Munch gave form to modern anxiety in a figure screaming with hands over its ears beneath a blood-red sky. A painting not of the visible world but of feeling inside, it deeply influenced German Expressionism.
Nature as cylinder, sphere and cone.
Painting the same mountain dozens of times, Cézanne built structure by stacking planes of color seen from several viewpoints rather than one fixed point. His words, treat nature as cylinder, sphere and cone, and his work led to Cubism. Picasso called him "the father of us all."
Color was freed from objects, 500-year-old perspective was broken, and the object itself disappeared. Finally came the question: if an artist declares something art, is it art?
You can paint a face green.
Seeing the intense primary colors of Matisse and his friends, a critic called them "Fauves," wild beasts. Matisse put a green stripe down his wife's face, showing that color need not follow an object's actual color.
Many viewpoints fractured into one picture.
Picasso painted figures with faces influenced by African masks and fractured space, and then, with Braque, created Cubism, layering views from several viewpoints into a single picture. It broke the single viewpoint of perspective that had held for 500 years since the Renaissance. Some argue that popular talk of the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry influenced it.
A racing car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
Italy's Marinetti published a manifesto in a newspaper rejecting museums and the past and glorifying speed, machines and the city. Futurist painting, which depicted movement as sequences of forms, followed.
Removing the object from painting.
Believing that, like music, color and form alone could express emotion, Kandinsky painted abstract pictures with no objects, and the same year founded the Blue Rider group and published Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
A single black square on white.
Russia's Kazimir Malevich hung a painting of nothing but a black square on white high in the corner of the gallery, where Orthodox icons are hung. It was the manifesto of Suprematism, reducing painting to its purest form.
Signing a store-bought urinal.
Duchamp signed a urinal bought from a store with a pseudonym, titled it Fountain and submitted it to an exhibition, which rejected it. By asking whether something becomes art when an artist chooses and declares it so, it became the origin point of conceptual art. The same year in the Netherlands, Mondrian and others launched De Stijl, using only vertical and horizontal lines and primary colors.
Art, technology and craft as one.
Walter Gropius founded a school in Weimar, Germany, that taught art, craft and industrial design together. Pursuing simple, functional forms, the Bauhaus became the standard for modern architecture and design.
Painting dreams and the unconscious.
Influenced by Freud, André Breton published a manifesto calling for art that expresses the world of dreams and the unconscious, free from the control of reason. In 1931 Dalí's melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory and Magritte's The Treachery of Images ("This is not a pipe") led the movement.
Denouncing a bombing, and modern art persecuted.
When the town of Guernica was bombed during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso denounced the horror of war in a huge black-and-white mural. The same year Nazi Germany staged the "Degenerate Art" exhibition to ridicule and ban modern art, and many artists fled to America.
After World War II the center of art moved from Paris to New York. From Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art to video, land art and performance, the boundaries of what counts as art kept widening.
Laying the canvas on the floor and flinging paint.
Jackson Pollock spread his canvas on the floor and moved around it, dripping and flinging paint. In this "action painting," the act of painting itself became the work, announcing that American art had become the center of the world.
Meditation before vast color.
Mark Rothko stacked large fields of color with soft edges, aiming to create an emotional experience that envelops the viewer. He said he wanted people to weep in front of his paintings.
The supermarket shelf goes to the museum.
Andy Warhol painted 32 flavors of soup cans identically and went on to mass-produce silkscreen images of popular icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Coca-Cola. Pop Art brought the imagery of mass production and consumer society into art.
Television as a brush, ideas as the work.
Nam June Paik pioneered video art, using television and video as artistic materials, while Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs, which set a real chair beside a photograph of it and the dictionary definition of "chair," showed conceptual art, in which the heart of a work is the idea, not the object. The next year in New York, Minimalist sculpture repeating simple geometric forms drew attention.
A spiral drawn in earth and stone on a lake.
Robert Smithson built a spiral causeway about 460 m long of earth and basalt in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Leaving the museum and making the land itself the work, it is the landmark of land art.
The body itself as the work.
Marina Abramović stood motionless for six hours while the audience was free to use any of 72 objects on a table, from a flower and a feather to a knife and a gun, on her body. In performance art, the artist's body and the audience's participation are the work.
From street graffiti to the museum.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, who had worked as a graffiti artist on the streets of New York, became an art-world star with paintings of raw lines, words and images like skulls that dealt with race and power. He died at 27.
Death in a tank of formaldehyde.
Damien Hirst placed a 4-meter tiger shark in a glass tank of formaldehyde and titled it The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. With shocking subjects and a sharp sense of the market, he came to represent the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s.
Giant museums and the auction market shaped the art world, and the digital and AI raised the question once again: whose making counts as art?
A power station becomes a museum of modern art.
Tate Modern opened in a converted, decommissioned power station on the Thames in London. Its vast Turbine Hall became a stage for large installations, and Tate Modern became one of the most visited modern art museums in the world.
A $450 million painting.
Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold at auction for about $450 million, the most expensive artwork ever sold. Debate continues over its authenticity and the extent of its restoration.
Two events in the auction room.
In October at Christie's, Edmond de Belamy, made with a generative adversarial network (GAN), sold for more than $430,000. The same month at Sotheby's, Banksy's Girl with Balloon was shredded by a device hidden in its frame right after the hammer fell, and became a new work in that state.
$69 million for a single digital file.
Digital artist Beeple's collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold as a non-fungible token (NFT) at Christie's for about $69 million. It set off debate over what it means to "own" a digital work that can be copied endlessly.
AI art takes first place at an art fair.
Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, made with Midjourney, won first place in the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair, sparking fierce debate. The same year, as image-generating AI that lets anyone make pictures from text went mainstream, questions about authorship, copyright and the meaning of creativity returned to the center of art.