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Art history timeline
Major Western art movements from the Renaissance to today. Dates are approximate — movements overlap and blur into each other. See also the book and the gallery.
Renaissance
A revival of classical ideas in Italy and northern Europe: linear perspective, anatomy, naturalism and oil painting on panel and canvas.
Key artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer
Mannerism
Late Renaissance style with elongated figures, complex poses and unusual colour.
Key artists: Pontormo, Parmigianino, Bronzino, El Greco
Baroque
Drama, movement and strong light-and-dark contrast (chiaroscuro and tenebrism).
Key artists: Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Artemisia Gentileschi, Vermeer
Rococo
Light, decorative and playful, with pastel colours and elegant scenes.
Key artists: Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Neoclassicism
A return to the clarity and order of ancient Greece and Rome, often with moral or civic themes.
Key artists: Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Angelica Kauffman
Romanticism
Emotion, the sublime power of nature, imagination and the individual.
Key artists: J. M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Eugène Delacroix, Francisco Goya
Realism
Ordinary people and everyday life painted truthfully, without idealisation.
Key artists: Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, Rosa Bonheur, Honoré Daumier
Impressionism
Light, atmosphere and modern life captured with visible brushstrokes, often outdoors. The group's first independent exhibition was in Paris in 1874.
Key artists: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas
Post-Impressionism
Artists who built on Impressionism but pushed towards structure, symbolism or expressive colour.
Key artists: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat
Art Nouveau and Symbolism
Flowing organic lines, decorative pattern, and dreamlike or symbolic subjects.
Key artists: Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, Odilon Redon
Fauvism
Bold, non-naturalistic colour applied with energy. 'Fauves' means 'wild beasts'.
Key artists: Henri Matisse, André Derain
Expressionism
Distortion and intense colour to express emotion rather than appearance.
Key artists: Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele
Cubism
Objects broken into facets and shown from several viewpoints at once.
Key artists: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris
Dada
An anti-art movement responding to the First World War with absurdity, chance and readymades.
Key artists: Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, Hans Arp
Surrealism
Dreams, the unconscious and unexpected juxtapositions. André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.
Key artists: Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington
Abstract Expressionism
Large-scale abstraction centred in New York — gestural 'action painting' and colour-field painting.
Key artists: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner
Pop Art
Imagery from advertising, comics and mass culture.
Key artists: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton
Minimalism and Conceptual art
Reduced, geometric forms; and art in which the idea matters more than the object.
Key artists: Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt
Photorealism
Paintings that closely imitate photographs.
Key artists: Chuck Close, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack
Street art and graffiti
Art in public space, from New York subway graffiti to murals worldwide.
Key artists: Jean-Michel Basquiat (early work), Keith Haring
Contemporary and digital
A global, plural field: installation, video, digital painting, and many revived traditions side by side.
Key artists: Artists working worldwide in every medium