A short history of Western art

Art is far older than writing. Paintings of animals in caves such as Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain date back roughly 17,000 to over 30,000 years, and hand stencils in Indonesia and Spain are older still. Carved figures such as the Venus of Willendorf are around 25,000 to 30,000 years old.

Ancient Egyptian art followed strict conventions for thousands of years, showing figures with heads in profile and shoulders facing forward. Classical Greek sculptors, by contrast, pursued idealised, naturalistic human bodies, and the Romans added realistic portraiture and spread Greek styles across their empire.

In medieval Europe art was overwhelmingly religious. Byzantine mosaics and icons used gold backgrounds and flat, formal figures to suggest a heavenly realm rather than the physical world. Illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells combined text with intricate decoration.

Gothic cathedrals from the twelfth century onward, such as Chartres, filled vast interiors with stained glass that turned light into biblical stories. By the late Middle Ages, painters such as Giotto began giving figures weight, emotion and a sense of real space.

The Renaissance, beginning in fifteenth-century Italy, revived classical ideals and combined them with new techniques such as linear perspective and anatomical study. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael became its towering figures, while in Northern Europe Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer perfected detailed oil painting and printmaking.

Baroque art of the seventeenth century aimed for drama and emotional impact, partly encouraged by the Catholic Church's response to the Reformation. Caravaggio's stark lighting, Bernini's swirling sculptures and Rubens's energetic canvases are typical. In the Protestant Dutch Republic, Rembrandt and Vermeer painted portraits, landscapes and quiet domestic scenes for middle-class buyers.

Neoclassicism in the late eighteenth century returned to calm, orderly classical forms, often with moral or political messages, as in the work of Jacques-Louis David. Romanticism pushed back with emotion, nature and the sublime, seen in the stormy seas of J. M. W. Turner and the dramatic scenes of Eugène Delacroix.

In the 1870s the Impressionists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot, painted modern life and fleeting effects of light with quick, visible brushstrokes, and were initially mocked by critics. Post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin pushed further toward personal expression and simplified form.

• Fauvism, around 1905: Henri Matisse and others used intense, non-realistic colour.
• Cubism, from about 1907: Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque broke objects into geometric planes seen from several viewpoints.
• Expressionism: artists such as Edvard Munch and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner distorted forms to convey inner emotion.
• Dada, from 1916: a movement born during the First World War that mocked conventional art and logic.
• Surrealism, from the 1920s: Salvador Dalí and René Magritte explored dreams and the unconscious.
• Abstract art: Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich abandoned recognisable subjects altogether.

After the Second World War the centre of the art world shifted to New York. Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko made huge, gestural or meditative canvases. In the 1960s Pop Art, led by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, borrowed images from advertising, comics and celebrity culture.

Later movements, including Minimalism, Conceptual Art, performance art and installation art, questioned what an artwork even is, sometimes treating the idea as more important than the object. Today art is global and plural, with no single dominant style, and artists work across painting, video, digital media and public space.