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WEEK THREE, ART 101- ART APPRECIATION / Summer 2008 AN OUTLINE OF WESTERN ART HISTORY Art History is a specialized field of its own, and takes many years of study and practice to be considered competent in it. There are many separate courses in Art History at the undergraduate and graduate levels. This document is only the barest outline indicating the major art movements in western painting; the other visual arts such as sculpture, often are synchronous with the developments in painting. PREHISTORIC The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and spans all cultures. The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old; other famous examples come from Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth, or humans often hunting. There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in France, India, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia etc. No one is sure what these paint- ings had to the people who made them, but ideas include hunting magic, a depiction of hunting and religious experiences. Examples Cave paintings of the CroMagnon; this example is from Las- caux in France (about 16,000 years old) Venus of Willendorf (Austria, limestone carving, about 24,000 to 26,000 years old) Stonehenge (England, constructed in several stages, 8000- 1600 BC) ANTIQUITY: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome Ancient Egypt, a civilization with strong tradi- tions of architecture and sculpture (both origi- nally painted in bright colors), had many mural paintings in temples and buildings, and painted illustrations on papyrus manuscripts. Egyptian wall painting and decorative painting is often graphic, sometimes more symbolic than realis- tic. Egyptian painting depicts figures in bold out- line and flat silhouette, in which symmetry is a constant characteristic. Egyptian painting has close connection with its written language - called Egyptian hieroglyphs. Painted symbols are found amongst the first forms of written language. The Egyptians also painted on linen, remnants of which survive today. Ancient Egyptian paintings survived due to the ex- tremely dry climate. The ancient Egyptians created paintings to make the afterlife of the deceased a pleasant place. The themes included journey through the afterworld or their protective deities introducing the deceased to the gods of the underworld. Some exam- ples of such paintings are paintings of the gods and goddesses Ra, Horus, Anubis, Nut, Osiris and Isis. Some tomb paintings show activities that the deceased were involved in when they were alive and wished to carry on doing for eternity. In the New Kingdom and later, the Book of the Dead was buried with the entombed person. It was considered im- portant for an introduction to the afterlife. To the north of Egypt was the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete. The wall paint- ings found in the palace of Knossos are similar to those of the Egyptians but much more free in style. Around 1100 B.C., tribes from the north of Greece conquered Greece and its art took a new direction. The culture of Ancient Greece is noteworthy for its outstand- ing contributions to the visual arts. Painting on pottery of Ancient Greece and ceramics gives a particularly informative glimpse into the way society in Ancient Greece func- tioned. Many fine examples of Black-figure vase painting and Red-figure vase painting still exist. Some famous Greek painters who worked on wood panels and are mentioned in texts are Apelles, Zeuxis and Parrhasius; however, with the single exception of the Pitsa panels, no examples of Ancient Greek panel painting survive, only written descrip- tions by their contemporaries or later Romans. Zeuxis lived in the 5th century BC and was said to be the first to use sfumato. According to Pliny the Elder, the realism of his paintings was such that birds tried to eat the painted grapes. Apelles is described as the greatest painter of Antiquity, and is noted for perfect technique in drawing, brilliant color, and modeling. Roman art was influenced by Greece and can in part be taken as descendant from An- cient Greek painting. Roman paintings contain the first examples of trompe-l'oeil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape. Realistic portraits were found at the Late An- tique cemetery of Al-Faiyum. Examples Egypt: King Tutʼs Golden Mask (King Tut, 1333-1324 BC) Mesopotamia: Assyrian Winged Bull (c. 713-716 BC) Crete: Minoan Snake Goddess (c. 1600 BC) Greece: The Parthenon and its Sculptures (Elgin marbles) (c. 430 BC) Greece: The Winged Victory of Samothrace (c. 220-190 BC) Greece: The Death of Laocoøn and his Sons (160-20 BC) Rome: Al-Faiyum, Portrait of a man (c. 125-150 AD) MEDIEVAL PERIOD (MIDDLE AGES) (400-1500) The focus for art of the medieval period was the Christian religion, that of the Roman Catholic and Byzantine (Orthodox) faiths; the various Protestant faiths would begin much later, in the 1500s. After the decline of the western Roman Empire in the 400s, there was the simultaneous rise of medieval Christianity in the 500s. While the western portion of the Roman Empire declined with the rise of the barbarians, the eastern center of the Roman Empire in Byzantine Constantinople, Turkey, would remain intact, until the rise of Islam conquered it. In western Europe under the Roman Catholics, the first distinctive artistic style to emerge that included painting was the art of the British Isles, where the only surviving examples are miniatures in illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells; on main- land Europe, Carolingian and Ottonian art also survives. These are most famous for their abstract decoration, although figures of saints, and sometimes scenes, were also depicted. The art of this period combines insular and "barbarian" influences with a strong Byzantine influence and an aspiration to recover classical monumentality and poise. Byzantine art, once its style was established by the 6th century, placed great emphasis on retaining traditional iconography and style, and has changed relatively little through the thousand years of the Byzantine Empire and the continuing traditions of Greek and Russian Orthodox icon-painting up to today. Byzantine painting has a particularly hiera- tic feeling and icons were and still are seen as a reflection of the divine. In general Byz- antium art borders on abstraction, in its flatness and highly stylized depictions of figures and landscape. In western Europe of the medieval period, the walls of Romanesque and Gothic churches were decorated with frescoes as well as sculpture and many of the few re- maining murals have great intensity, and combine the decorative energy of Insular art with a new monumentality in the treatment of figures. Far more miniatures in Illuminated manuscripts survive from the period, showing the same characteristics, which continue into the Gothic period. Towards the middle of the 13th century, Medieval art and Gothic painting became more realistic, with the beginnings of interest in the depiction of volume and perspective in It- aly with Cimabue and then his pupil Giotto. They are considered to be the two great medieval masters of painting in western culture. Cimabue, within the Byzantine tradition, used a more realistic and dramatic approach to his art. His pupil, Giotto, took these in- novations to a higher level which in turn set the foundations for the western painting tra- dition in the Renaissance. Churches were built with more and more windows and the use of colorful stained glass become a staple in decoration in cathedrals. By the 14th century Western societies were both richer and more cultivated and painters found new patrons in the nobility and even the bourgeoisie. Illuminated manuscripts took on a new character and slim, fash- ionably dressed court women were shown in their landscapes. This style soon became known as the International style and tempera panel paintings and altarpieces gained importance. Examples Byzantine: Icon of Christ Pantocrator (“Christ, Ruler of All”) (c. AD 500- 600) Insular: Lindisfarne Gospels (c. AD 650-750) Insular: Book of Kells (c. AD 800) Romanesque: Church of St. Foy, Conques, France (c. AD 1000-1100) Romanesque: Verdun Altar (c. AD 1100) Gothic: Chartres Cathedral (c. AD 1200) Gothic: Unicorn Tapestries (AD 1495-1505) International Style: Tres Riches Heures (“The Very Rich Hours”) (c. AD 1410) Giotto: Scrovegni or Arena Chapel, “Lamentation” (AD 1305- 1306) RENAISSANCE (1400-1600) The Renaissance (French for 'rebirth'), a cultural movement roughly spanning the 14th through the mid 17th century, heralded the study of classical sources, as well as ad- vances in science which profoundly influenced European intellectual and artistic life. In Italy artists like Paolo Uccello, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelan- gelo, Raphael, Bellini and Titian took painting to a higher level through the use of per- spective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques. The northern Flemish, Dutch and German painters of the Renaissance such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Grünewald, Bosch, and Brueghel represent a different approach from their southern Italian colleagues, one that is more realistic and less idealized. The adoption of oil painting whose invention was traditionally, but errone- ously, credited to Van Eyck, (an important transitional figure who bridges painting in the Middle Ages with painting of the early Renaissance), made possible a new verisimilitude in depicting reality. Unlike the Italians, whose work drew heavily from the art of Ancient Greece and Rome, the northerners retained a stylistic residue of the sculpture and illu- minated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.
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