History of art
Inside a cave at Hohle Fels in Germany sits a small carved figure, one of the oldest non-stationary works of human art yet discovered. It was made somewhere between 43,000 and 35,000 BC. Nearby lay the oldest musical instruments ever unearthed. These objects belong to the history of art, the study of things people have made for spiritual, narrative, symbolic, decorative, and even functional reasons, always with an eye to their visual form. The subject is vast. It runs from containers in South Africa that may have held paints 100,000 years ago to video art and videogames. How do art historians decide what counts? Why do some civilizations leave colossal stone heads and others only feathers that rotted away? And why do we picture ancient temples as bare white marble when they were once painted in vivid reds, blues, and greens? The answers stretch across continents and millennia.
Fine arts get separated from applied arts in one common scheme of classification. Another approach focuses inclusively on human creativity. A third sorts everything by medium, grouping architecture, sculpture, painting, film, photography, and graphic arts. Each method draws different lines around the same objects.
The history of art is often told as a chronology of masterpieces, civilization by civilization. Framed this way, it becomes a story of high culture, epitomized by the Wonders of the World. Vernacular expressions also enter these narratives under the labels folk art or craft.
The closer a historian engages with these so-called low culture forms, the more their work shifts. They begin to describe what they do as the study of visual culture or material culture. The same objects may then be claimed by anthropology or archaeology, where they are called archeological artifacts. Where you stand changes what the object becomes, and that ambiguity follows art history into the deepest past.
Painters and sculptors from illiterate cultures left the earliest human artifacts, and prehistoric art is built almost entirely from such traces. Decorative artifacts from Middle Stone Age Africa rank among the first art objects of all. The deeper a historian digs, the fewer words there are to guide interpretation.
Venus figurines turn up all over the world, especially in Europe, carved with exaggerated breasts and bellies. The most famous are the Venus of Hohle Fels and the Venus of Willendorf, found in Germany and Austria. Most have small heads, wide hips, legs tapering to a point, and faces left blank. Arms and feet are frequently missing.
Lascaux, in the Dordogne region of France, holds the best known prehistoric artworks, large Paleolithic cave paintings of animals. Several hundred decorated caves are known across the Upper Paleolithic, roughly 38,000 to 12,000 BC. Examples survive in Ukraine, Italy, and Great Britain, though most cluster in France and Spain. The most accepted theory ties the paintings to religious rituals, perhaps to summon hunting success.
Mesopotamia witnessed the first cities and the earliest writing during the 4th millennium BC. The region sat within the Tigris-Euphrates river delta, and its northern half formed part of the Fertile Crescent, where early farming and permanent villages first appeared. Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylonia all lived here.
Uruk was the first city-state, ruled by king Gilgamesh, and Sumer gave the world its first organized religion, its first writing in cuneiform, its first irrigation, and its first wheeled vehicles. Mesopotamian builders worked in bricks, lintels, and cone mosaic. Their ziggurats rose as step pyramids that served as temples.
Assyria dominated the entire Middle East in the early 1st millennium BC, from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Its detailed stone reliefs, once painted in bright colours and set in palaces, show court life, hunting, and epic battles, along with Assyrian clothing and furniture. When the Babylonians conquered Assyria, Babylon became the largest city in the world during the 6th century BC. Visitors met the Ishtar Gate, its walls of vivid blue glazed bricks carrying dragons, bulls, and lions, named for the goddess of war and love.
King Cyrus II then took Babylon for the Achaemenid Empire, which reached from Egypt to the Indus Valley. At its capital Persepolis in Iran stood sculptures of religious images and the peoples of the empire, and a palace with a great audience hall for receiving guests.
Egyptian art was religious, symbolic, and built around immortality. A highly centralized hierarchy meant much of it honoured the pharaoh, including great monuments raised by professional artists and craftspeople. In painting, the pharaoh appears larger than the subjects or enemies beside him, and figures were drawn with heads and limbs in profile but torso, hands, and eyes from the front.
Funerary architecture took several forms. The mastaba was a rectangular tomb. Pyramids ranged from the step pyramid at Saqqarah to the smooth-sided pyramids at Giza. The hypogeum was an underground tomb, as in the Valley of the Kings. Temples grew into monumental complexes fronted by avenues of sphinxes and obelisks, as at Karnak, Luxor, Philae, and Edfu, while rock temples were cut at Abu Simbel and Deir el-Bahari.
Woodwork and metalwork flourished alongside the monuments. Cedar furniture inlaid with ebony and ivory survives from the tombs, and the pieces found in Tutankhamun's tomb carry great artistic value. Far to the east, the Indus Valley Civilization, discovered in 1922, left its own small treasures, most numerously square and rectangular stamp seals carved with animals, usually bulls, and very short Harappan texts.
China's first metal objects were made almost 4000 years ago during the Xia dynasty. In the Shang dynasty, families prepared elaborate banquets of food and drink for ancestral spirits, served in bronze ritual vessels of high quality and varied shape. Some bore readable characters, marking the development of writing, and were discovered along the Yellow River in Henan province at sites like Erlitou, Anyang, and Zhengzhou.
The taotie became one of the most common motifs, a stylized face split into near mirror-image halves with nostrils, eyes, eyebrows, jaws, cheeks, and horns. Whether it stood for real, mythological, or wholly imaginary creatures cannot be determined.
Sanxingdui, near Guanghan in Sichuan province, points to a sacrificial religious system unlike anything else in ancient China. Excavations since 1986 uncovered four pits, and over 4000 objects emerged in that year alone. Among them stood a great bronze human figure on a plinth decorated with abstract elephant heads, more than 50 bronze heads, and tubular fragments that probably represented trees.
Qinshi Huangdi ended the Warring States period and united China in 221 BC. He ordered a huge tomb guarded by the Terracotta Army, funerary art buried in 210 to 209 BC to protect the emperor in his afterlife. His Qin dynasty lasted only three years before the Han, during whose reign the Silk Road developed considerably.
Captive Greece overcame its savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Rome, the Latin poet Horace remarked in the age of Augustus. His line captures how ancient Greek and Roman art became the foundation of Western art, the standard most European artists aspired to until the 19th century.
Greek art drew its power from the human figure and from anthropomorphic gods as its chief subjects, made to decorate temples, celebrate victories, honour the dead, and serve as offerings. Historians divide it into Geometric, Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, with realism and idealism balanced most delicately in the Classical 5th and 4th centuries BC. Five of the Wonders of the World were Greek, among them the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus and the Colossus of Rhodes, yet the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens remains the prime example of the Greek temple.
No civilization shaped Western art as enduringly as Rome, sometimes derived from Greek precedent and partly inherited from Etruscan art. Roman sculpture leaned toward the realistic rather than the idealized. Concrete, the round arch, and the dome were Roman developments, used to raise aqueducts and triumphal arches like the Arch of Constantine. Glass-blowing made cameo glass possible, and much surviving Roman wall painting comes from Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.
A persistent error clings to these ruins. Ancient buildings were not monochrome. The Parthenon carried vibrant reds, blues, and greens, and even Medieval cathedrals kept coloured highlights on capitals and columns. The pigments were delicate and weathered away through the neglect of the Middle Ages. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, seeing only bleached ruins, promoted a white palette, and the colour was abandoned in the early Renaissance.
Little ancient art survives from Oceania, and the reason is material. Artists worked in perishable wood and feathers that did not last in the tropical climate, and no historical records describe most of it. Understanding begins instead with Western documentation, such as Captain James Cook in the 18th century, and later with the French artist Paul Gauguin, who spent years in Tahiti making modern art that became intertwined with Tahitian visual culture.
Aboriginal art of Australia tells the opposite story of endurance. In the Arnhem Land escarpment, evidence suggests paintings were being made fifty thousand years ago, antedating the rock paintings of Altamira and Lascaux in Europe. Rock engravings and rock paintings are its most durable forms, found across the continent, yet this longest of continuous traditions remained relatively unknown until the second half of the 20th century.
Sub-Saharan Africa shows how use itself transforms art. Many forms are made as conduits to the spirit world, and the more a work is used and blessed, the more abstract it becomes through added sacrificial matter and worn-down detail. The brass castings of the Benin Kingdom of southern Nigeria included altar tusks, brass heads, and plaques. The British ended that kingdom in 1897, and little of its art now remains in Nigeria, a loss that marks where one tradition's story was interrupted by force.
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Common questions
What does the history of art study?
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.
What is the oldest art in the history of art?
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.
Where are the most famous prehistoric cave paintings in art history?
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.
Why is ancient Greek and Roman art so important in the history of art?
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.
Were ancient buildings and statues originally white in the history of art?
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.
Why does so little ancient art survive from Oceania in the history of art?
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.
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