Culture of Europe

• 1. A Continent of Many Voices

  ›

  The Culture of Europe resists a single definition. K. Bochmann, a scholar who catalogued its core elements, listed five pillars: a shared heritage rooted in Greco-Roman antiquity, Christianity, Judaism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment; a dynamic material culture; respect for individual rights and liberty; a plurality of states exchanging ideas; and regard for peoples beyond Europe's borders. These five points, Berting noted, fit with "Europe's most positive realizations." No single formula captures a continent spanning Celtic metalwork and Byzantine mosaics, Dante's Florentine dialect and Tolstoy's Russian prose. Yet threads connect all of it. The Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Stearns Eliot, writing in his 1948 book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, credited Christianity as the root of European arts and law. That claim, contested and complicated over the centuries that followed, points toward one of Europe's oldest arguments: where does European culture begin, and where does it end?

• 2. Art From Stone to Canvas

  ›

  The oldest known representation of the human body found in Europe is the Venus of Hohle Fel, carved between 40,000 and 35,000 BC and discovered in Schelklingen, Germany. The Löwenmensch figurine, from about 30,000 BC, holds the distinction of being the oldest undisputed piece of figurative art. The oldest European cave art, at 40,800 years old, survives in the El Castillo Cave in Spain. At Astuvansalmi in the Saimaa area of Finland, rock paintings cling to cliff faces, among the fewer survivors of erosion.

  From those prehistoric roots, art branched into sharply different traditions. Ancient Greek sculpture developed naturalistic, idealized depictions of the human body at a remarkable rate between about 750 and 300 BC. Roman painting introduced trompe-l'oeil and pure landscape in wall paintings found at Pompeii and Herculaneum in Campania. Byzantine art turned toward abstraction and symbolism; portraits of later emperors decorated the interior of the sixth-century church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Gothic art, developing from Romanesque art in Northern France in the 12th century, spread across Western, Southern, and Central Europe. Images of the Virgin Mary shifted from the Byzantine iconic form to a more human and affectionate figure. The Baroque brought Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, and Diego Velazquez, whose paintings emphasized drama, movement, and rich warm colors. By the 18th century, Baroque had become Rococo in France, seeking inspiration from Far Eastern artistic forms and fueling a taste for chinoiserie and porcelain figurines. Rococo's fall prompted Neoclassicism, whose most celebrated figures included Ingres, Canova, and Jacques-Louis David. Romanticists like Eugene Delacroix, Francisco Goya, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Caspar David Friedrich, and William Blake followed, and then Realists, who turned to the hardships of the poor as industrialization remade European cities.

• 3. Building Across the Ages

  ›

  Knap of Howar and Skara Brae, stone-built Neolithic settlements in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, date from 3,500 BC, placing construction at the heart of European culture from its earliest chapters. Ancient Greek architecture formalized three defined orders: the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. Roman builders added concrete, the arch, and the dome, and large numbers of their structures survive in some form across the former empire.

  Gothic architecture, known during its own time as Opus Francigenum, or "French work," originated in 12th-century France. Its characteristics include the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, and the flying buttress. At Alnwick Castle, Gothic revival elements added in the 19th century sit alongside interiors designed in a Renaissance style, a typical collision of historical periods that defined 19th-century European revivalism.

  Renaissance architecture began in the early 14th century. Developed first in Florence with Filippo Brunelleschi as one of its innovators, it spread to France, Germany, England, and Russia. Palladian architecture, derived from the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), remained popular in Europe through the early 20th century. Art Deco architecture began in Brussels in 1903-04, making a clean break from Art Nouveau. Deconstructivist architecture appeared in the 1980s; a 1988 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York included European architects Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Bernard Tschumi, and gave the movement its name.

• 4. Words That Shaped the West

  ›

  Dante Alighieri wrote his Divine Comedy in the Florentine dialect rather than Latin, a deliberate choice at a time when most poetry was composed in a language only educated readers could access. His 1295 work The New Life followed the same principle. His decision helped standardize the Italian language, setting a precedent that Petrarch and Boccaccio would follow. Miguel de Cervantes, writing in Spanish, produced Don Quixote, a novel that has been called the "best book of all time" and the "best and most central work in world literature" by a number of prominent authors. Many scholars consider it the first modern novel.

  William Shakespeare left 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and several other verses. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Leo Tolstoy received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906. His failure to win became one of the most noted controversies in Nobel Prize history.

  As the Western Roman Empire declined, writers such as Cassiodorus, Boethius, and Symmachus kept the Latin tradition alive. The later establishment of medieval universities at Bologna, Padua, Vicenza, Naples, Salerno, Modena, and Parma helped spread learning and prepared the ground from which vernacular literature grew.

• 5. Film, Music, and Moving Images

  ›

  On the 28th of December 1895, Antoine Lumiere realized the first projection with the Cinematograph in Paris. Two years later, in 1897, Georges Melies established the first cinema studio on a rooftop property in Montreuil, near Paris. The Venice Film Festival, formally known as the Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia, is the oldest film festival in the world. On the 2nd of February 2000, Philippe Binant realized the first digital cinema projection in Europe. Notable European film movements include German Expressionism, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, the Polish Film School, and the Romanian New Wave. The European Film Awards recognize work across the continent.

  European music spans an equally wide arc. Medieval music ran from 500 to 1400; Renaissance music from 1400 to 1600. The common practice period in classical music ran from approximately 1600 to 1900. Folk music in Europe is embedded in an unwritten oral tradition, though it was increasingly transcribed from the 19th century onward. Many classical composers drew on folk melodies. Popular music genres that originated in Europe or developed European variants include Europop, Eurodisco, Eurodance, and Eurobeat, all rooted in electronic dance music. Musical traditions from nations formerly under Ottoman rule have fused with Ottoman influences over centuries, enriching the range further.

• 6. Religion and the Shape of Europe

  ›

  Christianity has been the dominant religion shaping European culture for at least 1,700 years, according to the source. The Roman Empire officially adopted Christianity in AD 380. Most of Europe underwent Christianization during the Early Middle Ages, with the process essentially complete after the Christianization of Lithuania in the High Middle Ages. In 2010-76.2% of Europeans identified as Christian. Catholics were the largest Christian group at more than 48% of European Christians; the Orthodox made up 32%; and about 19% belonged to the Protestant tradition. Russia is the largest Christian country in Europe by population, followed by Germany and Italy.

  According to the German Central Institute for Islamic Archives, the number of Muslims in Europe is approximately 53 million, or 5.2%, including Russia and the European part of Turkey. Historically, Islamic thought helped shape the European Enlightenment through the transmission of Arabic knowledge into Latin from the 12th century onward. Between 711 and 1492, Islamic al-Andalus was a leading center for the study of the classical heritage. Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) exerted significant influence; Ibn Rushd's rationalist commentaries revived Aristotelianism and laid the foundations of Latin Averroism.

  Judaism has a history in Europe beginning with Pompey's conquest of the eastern Mediterranean in 63 BCE. Before World War II, Europe's Jewish population was around nine million. Today, the largest Jewish community in Europe is in France, where Jews constitute roughly 1% of the population. According to a 2012 Pew Research study, the non-religious constituted 18.2% of Europe's population, forming the majority only in the Czech Republic, at 75%, and Estonia, at 60%.

• 7. Sport, Symbols, and Identity

  ›

  The ancient Olympic Games were traditionally dated to 776 BC. They were held every four years at Olympia in honor of Zeus, and their last recorded celebration was in AD 393 under the emperor Theodosius I. Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894, leading to the first modern Games in Athens in 1896. World Wars I and II led to the cancellation of the 1916, 1940, and 1944 Olympics.

  Association football traces its oldest association to The Football Association of England, founded in 1863. The first international match was between Scotland and England in 1872. The Tour de France is the world's most-watched live annual sporting event. Golf has its origins in Scotland, with the oldest course at Musselburgh. Each year since 1985, one or more cities across Europe are chosen as European Capital of Culture under an EU initiative. Athens was the first in 1985.

  The mythological figure of Europa gave the continent its name. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Zeus took the form of a white bull, carried Europa to Crete, revealed his identity, and made her the first queen of the island. Zeus later recreated the shape of the bull in the stars as the constellation Taurus. Charlemagne, King of the Franks from 768 and Holy Roman Emperor, was known as Pater Europae, or Father of Europe. A flag of Europe was introduced by the Council of Europe in 1955, originally intended as a symbol for the whole of Europe, though its adoption by the European Economic Community in 1985 gradually linked it more narrowly to the European Union.