Art historians employ a number of ways to group world arts into systems of classification. They subdivide the continuous flow of artworks through time and space into groupings. These groupings are defined by the perception that the artworks within them share a single quality or a set of qualities that are significant. Significant qualities reflect a specific approach of an artist; they can include the formal, stylistic, iconographic, thematic, or other aspects of art.
The definition of a grouping reflects judgments about the nature of meaningful connections between artworks, and between art and its larger context. Western arts are usually structured by art movements, using mostly cultural and aesthetic criteria, while Eastern arts are subdivided into periods according to political-dynastic markers.
Ancient Egyptian art
Egyptian art and architecture, the ancient architectural monuments, sculptures, paintings, and decorative crafts produced mainly during the dynastic periods of the first three millennia BCE in the Nile valley regions of Egypt and Nubia. The course of art in Egypt paralleled to a large extent the country’s political history, but it depended as well on the entrenched belief in the permanence of the natural, divinely ordained order.
Artistic achievement in both architecture and representational art aimed at the preservation of forms and conventions that were held to reflect the perfection of the world at the primordial moment of creation and to embody the correct relationship between humankind, the king, and the pantheon of the gods. For this reason, Egyptian art appears outwardly resistant to development and the exercise of individual artistic judgment, but Egyptian artisans of every historical period found different solutions for the conceptual challenges posed to them.
Ancient Greek art
Ancient Greek art stands out among that of other ancient cultures for its development of naturalistic but idealized depictions of the human body, in which largely nude male figures were generally the focus of innovation. The rate of stylistic development between about 750 and 300 BC was remarkable by ancient standards, and in surviving works is best seen in sculpture. There were important innovations in painting, which have to be essentially reconstructed due to the lack of original survivals of quality, other than the distinct field of painted pottery.
Medieval art
The thousand plus years between the division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western empires around the 4th century AD and the beginnings of the Renaissance in Europe are known as the medieval period. The era encompasses many artistic styles and periods, including early Christian and Byzantine, Anglo-Saxon and Viking, Insular, Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque, and Gothic. During the medieval period, the various secular arts were unified by the Christian church and the sacred arts associated with it.
This fascinating artistic period includes painted decorations from the catacombs in Rome, grand Byzantine monuments such as the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, famed mosaics in Ravenna, illuminated manuscripts and metalwork of the Insular art of Ireland and Britain such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. It also includes ivories, manuscripts and building projects of the Carolingian and Ottonian dynasties that produced such monuments as Charlemagne’s Palatine chapel at Aachen.
Additional prominent works of this period include Romanesque architecture, such as the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and the great Gothic cathedrals at Amiens, Reims and Notre-Dame in Paris with their façade sculpture, stained glass, altarpieces, and treasuries of enamels, reliquaries and embroidered vestments. The sophisticated visual culture encompassed numerous media—architecture, sculpture, painting, textiles, shrines and ivories. The works of the medieval period remain a rich area of study for scholars interested in diverse interdisciplinary topics such as economic history, political and religious studies and the status of women in medieval society.
Renaissance and Post-Renaissance art
Renaissance art, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature produced during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries in Europe under the combined influences of an increased awareness of nature, a revival of classical learning, and a more individualistic view of man. Scholars no longer believe that the Renaissance marked an abrupt break with medieval values, as is suggested by the French word renaissance, literally “rebirth.”
Rather, historical sources suggest that interest in nature, humanistic learning, and individualism were already present in the late medieval period and became dominant in 15th- and 16th-century Italy concurrently with social and economic changes such as the secularization of daily life, the rise of a rational money-credit economy, and greatly increased social mobility.
Self-consciousness was the quality that John Stuart Mill identified, in 1838, as “the daemon of the men of genius of our time.” Introspection was inevitable in the literature of an immediately Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as prone to self-analysis as were its individual authors. Hazlitt’s essays in The Spirit of the Age (1825) were echoed by Mill’s articles of the same title in 1831, by Thomas Carlyle’s essays “Signs of the Times” (1829) and “Characteristics” (1831), and by Richard Henry Horne’s New Spirit of the Age in 1844.
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophy of the art produced during that era.[1] The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.[2] Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic for the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art.
Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubists Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean Metzinger and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with “wild”, multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism.
Matisse’s two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse’s incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.
Contemporary art
Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 20th century.
Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organising principle, ideology, or “-ism”. Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality. In vernacular English, modern and contemporary are synonyms, resulting in some conflation and confusion of the terms modern art and contemporary art by non-specialists.
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