Art History Timeline

    • Paleolithic Art -The earliest known art, produced roughly between 40,000 and 10,000 BC, during the most recent ice age or the Old Stone Age.
    • Egyptian beginnings
    • Stone age of Italy and Sicily
    • Mesolithic Art - Middle Stone Age about 10,000 years ago
    • Neolithic Art - The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age began in Asia around 7000 B.C
    • Yang-Shao Culture, Neolithic culture that flourished in China about 3950-1700 BC.
    • Irish Art, 2500 BC
    • Japanese Art. 3000 BC
    • The Bronze Age - between the Stone Age and the Iron Age, when most tools and weapons were made of bronze.

    Related site: The cave of Lascaux



    • Cycladic Culture, unique and distinctive Greek civilization that flourished from about 3200 to 2000 BC
    • Indian Art - the art produced on the Indian subcontinent from about the 3rd millennium BC
    • Indus Valley Civilization, 2500-1700 BC, earliest known civilization of South Asia
    • Pre-Columbian Art - Art of the indigenous civilizations of Mesoamerica, the Andes and neighboring cultures before the 16th century AD.
    • Etruscan Art, early Italian Art to 1st cent. B.C.
    • Greek Art about 1100 BC to the 1st century BC.
    • Roman art - 500 BC.
    • African Art -500 - 200 B.C.
    • Eskimo Art - The art of the Eskimo peoples emerged about 2,000 years ago in the Bering Sea area and in Canada.
    • Coptic Art, artwork of the Copts, or Egyptian Christians, from the 3rd to the 12th century
    • Native American Art, the diverse traditional arts of the indigenous peoples of North America.
    • Oceanic art, works produced by the island peoples of the S and NW Pacific
    • Islamic Art, beginning in the 7th century AD
    • Anglo-Saxon Art, art produced in England by invading Germanic peoples from the 7th century to the Norman conquest in 1066.
    • American Art- beginning in the 17th Century
    • Canadian Art - beginning in the 17th Century

    Related site: Art History Resources on the Web



    • Early Christian Art - Biblical figures on catacomb walls in Rome from the early 3rd century
    • Medieval Art (or Art of the Middle Ages)
    • The Middle Ages spans the time from the 5th century A.D to the 15th century
    • Romanesque period - 11th and 12th centuries
    • Gothic style - 12th to 16th centuries (The International Gothic style emerged by the end of the 14th century)
    • The Italian Renaissance - In Italy the Renaissance emerged in the 14th century and reached its height in the 15th and 16th century. elsewhere in Europe it dated from the 15th to the mid-17th century
    • The Early Italian Renaissance
    • The High Renaissance
    • Mannerism ( Late Renaissance)
    • Northern European Renaissance Painting - the northern countries, such as Germany, the Lowlands (Flanders and the Netherlands), England, France, and Spain
    • Baroque
    • Early Baroque (c.1590-c.1625)
    • High Baroque (c.1625-c.1660)
    • Late Baroque (c.1660-c.1725)
    • Rococo Style -18th-century
    • Romanticism - late 18th and 19th century
    • England, France, Germany, United States
    • Barbizon School - group of French painters, from about 1830 to 1870
    • Neoclassical Art - art produced in Europe and North America from about 1750 through the early 1800s, marked by the emulation of Greco-Roman forms.
    • Nazarenes - young German artists who formed a brotherhood in Rome in 1810 to restore Christian art to its medieval purity.
    • Pre-Raphaelites - English brotherhood formed in 1848 to protest the formula-driven art of the Royal Academy
    • Realism - began in the mid-19th century
    • Impressionism - 1874 - 1886
    • Symbolist Movement - late 19th century.
    • Neoimpressionism or Pointillism - late 19th century
    • Post-Impressionism - 1886 - 1910

    Related sites: World Art Treasures, Carol Gerten's Fine Art



    • Modern Art - terms roughly designating 20th-century art, comprising many movements, styles, and schools.
    • Fauvism - 1905-1909
    • Expressionism - 1906-1919
    • Cubism - 1909-1926
    • Futurism - 1909-1918
    • Suprematism - about 1913
    • Dadaism - 1916-1922
    • Surrealism - 1924-1938
    • De Stijl - 1916-1931
    • Constructivism - 1917-1924
    • Abstract Expressionism - 1940's
    • Pop Art - 1961-1968
    • Kinetic Art - 1950's-1960's
    • Op Art - 1964-1967
    • Minimalism - 1966-1970
    • Conceptual Art - 1960's and 70's

Related site: About.com - Art History