Art & the Renaissance
Events · 34
- c. 16,000 BCEHistory of Art
The Cave Paintings of Lascaux
Deep inside a cave at Lascaux in southwestern France, Upper Palaeolithic people painted some 600 images — mostly horses, deer, aurochs, and bison — in flowing compositions, using pigments of ochre, charcoal, and manganese. The paintings date to roughly 17,000–15,000 BCE.
Reputable source - c. 2500 BCEHistory of Art
The Art of Ancient Egypt
Over three thousand years, ancient Egyptian artists produced a remarkably stable, highly stylised art of painting, relief, and monumental sculpture. Figures followed strict conventions — heads in profile, torsos frontal — and the size of a figure showed its importance, with gods and pharaohs largest of all. Much of it was made for tombs and temples, focused on the afterlife.
Reputable source - c. 450 BCEHistory of Art
Classical Greek Sculpture
In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Greek sculptors achieved a new naturalism, rendering the human body with lifelike proportion, balance, and the relaxed weight-shift known as contrapposto. Idealised yet convincingly real, works like those of Polykleitos and Praxiteles set a standard of beauty for the human form.
Reputable source - c. 100 CEHistory of Art
Roman Art
The Romans absorbed and adapted Greek art on a vast scale, excelling in strikingly realistic portrait sculpture, narrative reliefs on monuments like Trajan's Column, richly painted walls, and intricate floor mosaics. Roman art served the state, the household, and the memory of the dead across a Mediterranean-wide empire.
Reputable source - c. 550 CEHistory of Art
Byzantine Art
In the Christian empire centred on Constantinople, artists created a luminous religious art of golden mosaics, icons, and manuscripts. Flattened, frontal, and otherworldly, Byzantine images used shimmering gold grounds and solemn figures to lift the worshipper toward the divine.
Reputable source - 12th–13th centuryHistory of Art
Gothic Art and the Cathedral
From the mid-12th century a new style rose across Europe, most spectacularly in the Gothic cathedral. Pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses let walls open into vast windows of stained glass, flooding interiors with coloured light, while sculpture and illuminated manuscripts flourished alongside.
Reputable source - c. 1305The Renaissance
Giotto's Frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel
In the Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel in Padua, the Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone (1267/1277–1337) covered the walls with a cycle of 38 scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. Abandoning the flat, conventional religious imagery of the Middle Ages, he gave his figures the weight of real people expressing real emotions, and used highlights, shadow, and painted architecture to create a convincing illusion of depth.
Reputable source - 1345The Renaissance
Petrarch and the Birth of Humanism
The Italian poet and scholar Petrarch (1304–1374) rejected the scholasticism of his day and argued that a new golden age could be reached by returning to the ideals of classical antiquity. Hunting through monastic libraries for forgotten texts, in 1345 he rediscovered a 'lost' collection of Cicero's Letters to Atticus in Verona. His outlook — a revived interest in the classical world and in what it means to be human — became known as humanism.
Reputable source - 1436The Renaissance
Brunelleschi Completes the Dome of Florence Cathedral
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) completed the vast brick dome of Florence Cathedral, making it the largest and tallest building in Europe of its time. He raised it without the fixed wooden centring builders had always relied on, using a self-supporting double shell braced by ribs and bricks laid in a reinforcing herringbone pattern. In the same years he conducted his famous public experiments in linear perspective.
Reputable source - May 29, 1453The Renaissance
The Fall of Constantinople
After a siege of some six weeks, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II — thereafter known as 'the Conqueror' — stormed Constantinople on Tuesday, 29 May 1453, his great cannons breaking walls that had guarded the city for a thousand years. The fall ended the Byzantine Empire, the last surviving link to the ancient Roman world.
Reputable source - c. 1455The Renaissance
Gutenberg's Printing Press
In Mainz, around 1454–1455, Johannes Gutenberg produced his great Bible, the first large book printed in Europe with movable metal type. Gutenberg is credited with inventing the process of making uniform, interchangeable metal types; his Bible was printed in double columns of 42 lines to a page, with the coloured initials added by hand.
Primary source - c. 1480–1485The Renaissance
Botticelli's The Birth of Venus
Between about 1480 and 1484, Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) painted The Birth of Venus, showing the goddess arriving on the shore, newly born from the sea. Likely commissioned by the Medici, Florence's ruling banking dynasty, it took its subject from classical mythology rather than religion — a striking departure for a painter known mostly for altarpieces.
Reputable source - 1492The Renaissance
Columbus Reaches the Americas
Sailing west from Spain in 1492 in search of a route to Asia, Christopher Columbus instead reached islands of the Caribbean, where he encountered the Taíno people. The account he sent home was printed in 1493 and circulated widely, and his voyages opened a sustained, and for Native peoples catastrophic, era of European contact and colonization of the Americas.
Primary source - 1495–1498The Renaissance
Leonardo's The Last Supper
On the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) painted The Last Supper, capturing the moment Christ announces his betrayal and the varied emotional reactions of the twelve apostles. Rather than true fresco, Leonardo used an experimental mix of oil and tempera on dry plaster, and the paint began to flake within a decade.
Reputable source - 15th–16th centuryHistory of Art
The Renaissance
In Italy from the 1400s, artists revived the naturalism and ideals of classical antiquity and married them to new techniques — linear perspective, anatomy, and oil paint. Masters such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael produced works of unprecedented realism and harmony, and the artist rose from craftsman to celebrated genius.
Reputable source - 1501–1504The Renaissance
Michelangelo's David
Between 1501 and 1504, Michelangelo (1475–1564) carved David from a single massive block of Carrara marble that other sculptors had abandoned. Standing about 5.2 metres (17 feet) tall, the tense, watchful nude evoked the colossal statues of antiquity and was set up in the main square of Florence as a civic symbol.
Reputable source - c. 1503–1506The Renaissance
Leonardo's Mona Lisa
Around 1503–1506, Leonardo da Vinci began the Mona Lisa, an oil portrait on a wood panel of an unidentified woman. He sought to capture 'the motions of the mind,' softening edges and using aerial perspective and subtle gradations of light and shade. Leonardo never parted with the painting during his lifetime.
Reputable source - 1508–1512The Renaissance
Michelangelo Paints the Sistine Chapel Ceiling
Commissioned by Pope Julius II, Michelangelo signed the contract on 8 May 1508 and laboured until the ceiling was unveiled on 31 October 1512. Across the vault he painted nine central scenes from the Book of Genesis — among them the Creation of Adam — framed by monumental prophets and sibyls seated on thrones.
Reputable source - 1509–1511The Renaissance
Raphael's The School of Athens
For Pope Julius II, Raphael (1483–1520) frescoed The School of Athens in the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican Palace, completing it around 1511. It gathers nearly every great thinker of antiquity in a grand painted hall, with Plato pointing to the heavens and Aristotle gesturing to the earth at the composition's centre.
Reputable source - 1511The Renaissance
Erasmus and Northern Humanism
The Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469–1536), one of the founders of Renaissance humanism, made full use of the printing press to publish editions of classical authors and fresh translations of the New Testament. His satire In Praise of Folly (1511) mocked the failings of church and society, urging reform through education and a return to the sources.
Reputable source - 1513The Renaissance
Machiavelli Writes The Prince
After the Medici returned to power in Florence in 1512 and stripped him of his post as second chancellor — even imprisoning and torturing him in early 1513 — Niccolò Machiavelli retreated to his farm and wrote The Prince late in 1513. Purging politics of conventional moralizing, he argued that the ruler's real concern is the acquisition and maintenance of power. The book was published posthumously in 1532.
Reputable source - 1514The Renaissance
Albrecht Dürer and the Northern Renaissance
From Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) blended the detailed realism of Northern Europe with the balance and proportion of Italian art. In 1514 he produced his celebrated Master Engravings, and over his career made more than 300 prints as well as influential treatises on art theory, spreading Renaissance ideas through the new medium of the printed image.
Reputable source - October 31, 1517The Renaissance
Luther's Ninety-Five Theses
On 31 October 1517, the monk and theologian Martin Luther issued ninety-five theses denouncing the sale of indulgences — writs the Church sold to reduce time in purgatory — as unbiblical and greedy. He meant them as an invitation to scholarly debate, but once translated from Latin into German and spread by the printing press, they became a direct challenge to Church authority.
Reputable source - 1543The Renaissance
Copernicus and the Heliocentric Universe
In 1543, the year he died, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Against the accepted geocentric view, he argued that the Earth and planets orbit the Sun, and that the Earth turns on its own axis each day, setting the planets in a new order out from the Sun.
Reputable source - 1543The Renaissance
Vesalius Refounds Anatomy
Also in 1543, the 28-year-old anatomist Andreas Vesalius (born 1514) published On the Fabric of the Human Body (De humani corporis fabrica). He described every structure of the body from his own dissections of human cadavers rather than from ancient texts, illustrated with detailed engravings, and showed that parts of the long-revered anatomy of Galen were simply wrong.
Reputable source - 1590sThe Renaissance
Shakespeare and the English Renaissance
Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, William Shakespeare made his career in the London theatre, and by December 1594 was a leading member of the acting company later known as the King's Men. Through the 1590s he wrote history plays, comedies, and early tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet, bringing Renaissance humanism into the English language.
Reputable source - 17th centuryHistory of Art
The Baroque
The Baroque style of the 17th century embraced drama, movement, and emotional intensity, using bold contrasts of light and dark, vivid realism, and dynamic composition. Artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Bernini created work that gripped the viewer, often in the service of the Catholic Church or absolute monarchs.
Reputable source - c. 1800–1850History of Art
Romanticism
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Romantic artists rebelled against the cool order of Neoclassicism, exalting emotion, imagination, and the sublime power of nature. Painters such as Turner, Delacroix, and Friedrich sought to stir feeling and awe rather than to instruct.
Reputable source - 1874History of Art
Impressionism
In 1874 a group of Paris painters — among them Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Morisot — held their own exhibition after repeated rejection by the official Salon. Working quickly and often outdoors, they used loose, visible brushstrokes to capture fleeting effects of light and atmosphere. A critic mocked one Monet canvas, 'Impression, Sunrise,' and the name stuck.
Reputable source - 1880s–1900History of Art
Post-Impressionism
In the decades after Impressionism, artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat pushed beyond capturing light to use colour, pattern, and form for personal and symbolic expression. Cézanne sought underlying structure; Van Gogh charged his canvases with emotion through vivid colour and swirling brushwork.
Reputable source - 1907History of Art
Cubism
Around 1907, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque shattered the single, fixed viewpoint that had governed Western painting since the Renaissance. In Cubism they broke objects into geometric facets and showed several viewpoints at once, beginning with Picasso's radical 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.'
Reputable source - 1924History of Art
Surrealism
Launched in Paris in 1924 with André Breton's first manifesto, Surrealism sought to unlock the unconscious mind and the world of dreams. Artists such as Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Max Ernst painted uncanny, dreamlike images and invented chance-based techniques to bypass rational control.
Reputable source - 1940s–1950sHistory of Art
Abstract Expressionism
In New York after the Second World War, artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning made large, wholly abstract paintings meant to convey raw emotion and the act of painting itself. Pollock famously dripped and poured paint onto canvases laid on the floor.
Reputable source - 1950s–1960sHistory of Art
Pop Art
Emerging in Britain and the United States, Pop Art drew its imagery from advertising, comic books, and consumer products. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein turned soup cans, celebrities, and comic panels into art, often using commercial techniques like silk-screen printing.
Reputable source