Short answers, pulled from the story.
The history of art studies objects made by humans for spiritual, narrative, philosophical, symbolic, conceptual, documentary, decorative, and even functional purposes, with a primary emphasis on their aesthetic visual form. It spans media including architecture, sculpture, painting, film, photography, and graphic arts, and more recently video art, computer art, animation, television, and videogames.
Among the first art objects are decorative artifacts from Middle Stone Age Africa, and containers found in South Africa may have held paints as far back as 100,000 years ago. The Caves and Ice Age Art sites in the Swabian Jura hold the oldest non-stationary works of human art yet discovered, carved figurines dating between 43,000 and 35,000 BC.
The best known prehistoric cave paintings are at Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France. Several hundred decorated caves are known across the Upper Paleolithic period, roughly 38,000 to 12,000 BC, with most concentrated in France and Spain.
Ancient Greek and Roman art became the foundation and inspiration of Western art, serving as the standard most European artists aspired to until the 19th century. The Latin poet Horace described how captive Greece brought the arts to Rome, and Greek work transmitted through the Roman Empire was rediscovered during the early Renaissance.
No, ancient buildings and artworks were originally painted in vivid colours. The Parthenon had details painted in reds, blues, and greens, and Medieval cathedrals kept coloured highlights on capitals and columns. The delicate pigments weathered away, and Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo promoted a white palette inspired by the bleached ruins.
Little ancient art survives from Oceania because artists used perishable materials such as wood and feathers that did not survive the tropical climate, and there are no historical records for most of it. The exception is Aboriginal rock art of Australia, where evidence in the Arnhem Land escarpment suggests paintings were made fifty thousand years ago.