Art movements in order

The main art periods, in order

1. Medieval art, AD 500 to 1450. A thousand years of faith in paint: books, altarpieces and colored light.
2. Renaissance, 1400 to 1600. Perspective, anatomy and the study of antiquity put people at the center.
3. Mannerism, 1520 to 1600. Elongated figures, strange colors and artful tension.
4. Baroque, 1600 to 1750. Drama, shadow and movement.
5. Rococo, 1715 to 1780. Pastel lightness, flirtation and pleasure gardens.
6. Neoclassicism, 1760 to 1830. Clear outlines and stern virtue, modeled on Greece and Rome.
7. Romanticism, 1790 to 1850. Storms, ruins and the sublime power of feeling.
8. Realism, 1848 to 1900. Ordinary life painted without flattery.
9. Impressionism, 1867 to 1910. Light caught in the act of changing.
10. Post-Impressionism, 1886 to 1905. Color and form set free to carry feeling and structure.

Early Middle Ages (the Dark Ages)

AD 500 to 1000. Monks illuminate gospels in gold, and Byzantium keeps the mosaics glowing.

• Medieval artAD 500 to 1450

  A thousand years of faith in paint: books, altarpieces and colored light. Began: after the fall of Rome, 476.

  • Gothic art, 1140 to 1400. Graceful figures, gold leaf and the first painted rooms.
  • Sienese School, 1260 to 1450. Jewel color and gold, and tender Madonnas.
  • International Gothic, 1375 to 1435. Courtly elegance, flowing robes and precious detail.
• Icon paintingAD 550 to today

  Holy images painted to a sacred pattern, made to be venerated. Began: the oldest surviving icons, at Mount Sinai, 6th century.

Romanesque

1000 to 1150. Thick-walled churches carved with saints and monsters.

• Russian icon painting1000 to 1900

  Byzantine icons reimagined in Novgorod and Moscow, glowing and serene. Began: after Rus' adopts Christianity, 988; Rublev's Trinity, c. 1411–25.

Early Renaissance

1400 to 1490. Florence rediscovers perspective; Flanders perfects oil paint.

• Renaissance1400 to 1600

  Perspective, anatomy and the study of antiquity put people at the center. Began: Florence, c. 1400; Masaccio's Holy Trinity, c. 1427.

  • Early Renaissance, 1400 to 1490. Florence rediscovers perspective and the human body.
  • Venetian painting, 1460 to 1600. Color and light over line: Bellini, Giorgione, Titian.
  • High Renaissance, 1490 to 1527. Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo at their peak.
  • Mannerism, 1520 to 1600. Elongated figures, strange colors and artful tension.
  • School of Fontainebleau, 1530 to 1610. Italian Mannerism at the French court: elegant nudes and allegory.
• Northern Renaissance1420 to 1600

  Oil paint, jewel tones and every hair rendered. Began: Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece, 1432.

  • Early Netherlandish painting, 1420 to 1520. Microscopic detail in luminous oil.
  • German Renaissance, 1495 to 1560. Dürer's prints, Cranach's courts and Holbein's portraits.
  • Sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting, 1520 to 1600. Peasant feasts, world landscapes and market scenes.
• Cretan School1450 to 1669

  Post-Byzantine icons for Orthodox and Catholic buyers; El Greco trained here. Began: after the fall of Constantinople, 1453.

Late Renaissance

1530 to 1600. Titian's color in Venice, Bruegel's peasants, and the elegant strangeness of Mannerism.

• Spanish colonial painting1530 to 1821

  Faith and splendor from the workshops of Mexico, Cusco and Quito, where Indigenous and mestizo artists made European models their own. Began: European painters reach Mexico from the 1530s; workshops flourish from the 1560s.

  • Painting in New Spain, 1550 to 1821. Mexico's churches and convents, from Mannerism to the high Baroque.
  • Cusco School, 1650 to 1800. Andean painters' radiant, gold-stamped saints and archangels.
  • New Mexican santos, 1750 to 1900. Saints painted on wooden panels by local santeros.

Baroque

1600 to 1720. Drama, shadow and movement: Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt.

• Baroque1600 to 1750

  Drama, shadow and movement. Began: Caravaggio's Saint Matthew canvases and the Carracci in Rome, c. 1600.

  • Spanish Golden Age painting, 1580 to 1700. Velázquez at court, Zurbarán and Murillo in Seville's churches.
  • Bolognese School, 1585 to 1660. A reformed, classical Baroque.
  • Caravaggism, 1600 to 1650. Raking light out of darkness and real, unidealized people.
  • Flemish Baroque, 1608 to 1700. Rubens's color and flesh, Van Dyck's portraits.
  • French classicism, 1630 to 1700. Order, reason and ideal landscapes.
• Dutch Golden Age1600 to 1700

  A merchant republic's love of everyday beauty: interiors, still lifes and skies. Began: the Dutch Republic, c. 1600–1700.

  • Delft School, 1650 to 1680. Light falling through windows onto quiet rooms.
• Academic art1648 to 1900

  The official art of the academies: polished finish, history and myth, prizes and Salons. Every continent had its academy. Began: the French Royal Academy, founded 1648.

  • Grand Manner portraiture, 1750 to 1830. Britain's elite posed like heroes from ancient history.
  • Academy of San Carlos, 1781 to 1910. Mexico's academy: history painting and José María Velasco's vast valley views.
  • French Salon painting, 1850 to 1900. Flawless surfaces, nymphs and history: the taste the Impressionists rebelled against.
  • Munich School, 1850 to 1914. Dark, virtuoso realism taught at the Munich Academy to Poles, Greeks, Americans and Scandinavians.
  • Victorian classicism, 1860 to 1910. Marble terraces and sunlit antiquity.
• Early American art1660 to 1840

  Limners, Copley and Stuart: the faces of a colonial elite and a new republic. Began: the Freake portraits, Boston, c. 1671; Copley's Boston, 1760s.

  • Colonial limners, 1660 to 1760. Flat, carefully patterned portraits by self-taught painters.
  • Federal-era portraiture, 1776 to 1830. Stuart and the Peales picture the founders and the young republic.
  • Early African American painters, 1790 to 1865. Among the first known Black professional painters in the United States.
• Rococo1715 to 1780

  Pastel lightness, flirtation and pleasure gardens. Began: Watteau's Pilgrimage to Cythera, 1717.

Rococo

1720 to 1780. Pastel skies, swings and silk: art for the salon.

• Folk art1700 to today

  Art made outside the academies: honest, bold and full of local life. Began: made everywhere by self-taught and trade painters; collected as 'folk art' from the 1920s.

  • American folk art, 1780 to 1900. Itinerant portraitists, Edward Hicks's Peaceable Kingdoms and painted chests.
• Neoclassicism1760 to 1830

  Clear outlines and stern virtue, modeled on Greece and Rome. Began: Winckelmann's call to imitate the Greeks, 1755; David's Oath of the Horatii, 1784.

Neoclassicism

1780 to 1815. Rome and Greece again, clear and heroic, in the age of revolutions.

• Romanticism1790 to 1850

  Storms, ruins and the sublime power of feeling. Began: the 1790s; Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, 1819.

  • British Romantic landscape, 1790 to 1850. Turner and Constable remake the English sky; the golden age of watercolor.
  • German Romanticism, 1800 to 1840. Lone figures before vast nature.
  • Nazarene movement, 1809 to 1850. German painters reviving the sincerity of early Christian art.
  • French Romanticism, 1819 to 1850. Shipwrecks, revolutions and North African color.
  • Düsseldorf School, 1826 to 1890. A crisp, detailed landscape style that trained painters from Norway to America.

Romanticism

1815 to 1850. Storms, ruins and feeling over reason.

• Biedermeier1815 to 1848

  Cozy interiors, sharp portraits and modest middle-class pleasures. Began: after the Congress of Vienna, 1815, to the revolutions of 1848.

• Danish Golden Age1800 to 1850

  Clear northern light on Copenhagen and its people. Began: Eckersberg returns from Rome, 1816.

• Hudson River School1825 to 1880

  American wilderness painted as a promised land. Began: Thomas Cole's Catskill landscapes, 1825; named later.

  • Luminism, 1850 to 1880. Still water and glowing, glassy light.
• Costumbrismo1830 to 1890

  Local customs, dress and street life, from Lima to Mexico City. Began: the 1830s–1880s.

• Realism1848 to 1900

  Ordinary life painted without flattery. Every country had its realists. Began: Courbet's Stonebreakers, 1849; his Pavilion of Realism, 1855.

  • Barbizon School, 1830 to 1875. Painters who walked into the forest to paint nature directly.
  • Macchiaioli, 1855 to 1880. Patches of light and shade, painted outdoors before the Impressionists.
  • Hague School, 1860 to 1900. Grey Dutch skies, dunes and fishing boats.
  • Peredvizhniki, 1870 to 1923. Painters who left the Academy to show real life across the Russian Empire.
  • American Realism, 1865 to 1910. Homer's sea and Eakins's rowers, unsentimental and strong.
  • Naturalism, 1875 to 1900. Open-air realism with photographic detail.
  • Newlyn School, 1884 to 1914. Fishing families painted in the open air of a Cornish village.
  • Ashcan School, 1900 to 1920. Fast, frank pictures of city life.
• Pre-Raphaelites1848 to 1900

  Bright detail, medieval romance and moral earnestness. Began: founded in London, 1848.

Realism

1850 to 1874. Ordinary people and real places, painted as they were.

• Arts and Crafts movement1860 to 1920

  Handmade beauty against the machine: William Morris's patterns. Began: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 1861; named 1887.

• Aesthetic movement1860 to 1900

  Beauty for its own sake: harmonies of color and languid figures. Began: 'art for art's sake', London, 1860s.

• Japonisme1860 to 1910

  Japanese prints astonish Europe: flat color, high horizons, cropped views. Began: term coined by the critic Philippe Burty, 1872.

Impressionism

1874 to 1886. Light, outdoors, quickly: a moment caught in passing.

• Impressionism1867 to 1910

  Light caught in the act of changing. Painters everywhere made their own versions. Began: the 1860s; first group exhibition, Paris 1874.

  • American Impressionism, 1885 to 1920. Light and leisure, from Giverny to Connecticut.
  • Nagybánya artists' colony, 1896 to 1920. Hungarian painters bring open-air light home.
• Tonalism1880 to 1915

  Soft, moody landscapes in a single key. Began: c. 1880–1915; named later.

Post-Impressionism

1886 to 1905. Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin and Seurat take Impressionism somewhere new.

• Post-Impressionism1886 to 1905

  Color and form set free to carry feeling and structure. A later label, not a group. Began: c. 1886; named by Roger Fry in 1910.

  • Pointillism, 1886 to 1910. Color built from tiny dabs that mix in the eye. The movement's own name is Neo-Impressionism; Tate notes 'pointillism' is the popular name, one Signac rejected for 'divisionism'.
  • Pont-Aven School, 1886 to 1896. Flat color and bold outlines.
  • Les Nabis, 1888 to 1900. Bonnard and Vuillard: patterned, intimate rooms.
  • Italian Divisionism, 1891 to 1910. Threads of pure color in Alpine light and social subjects.
• Symbolism1880 to 1910

  Dreams, myths and the life of the soul. Began: Jean Moréas's Symbolist manifesto, 1886.

  • National Romanticism, 1880 to 1915. Epic legends and native landscapes for new national identities.
  • Young Poland, 1890 to 1918. Polish Symbolism and Art Nouveau: legends, landscapes and longing.
  • World of Art (Mir iskusstva), 1898 to 1924. Theater, fairy tale and nostalgic elegance: the designers of the Ballets Russes.
• Art Nouveau1890 to 1914

  Whiplash curves, flowers and flowing hair. Began: Horta's Hôtel Tassel, Brussels, 1893; Siegfried Bing's shop, Paris, 1895.

  • Jugendstil, 1896 to 1914. Germany's Art Nouveau.
  • Vienna Secession, 1897 to 1918. Gold, pattern and the body: Klimt's Vienna.
• School of Paris1900 to 1940

  Artists from everywhere who made Paris home. Began: c. 1900–1940; named by the critic André Warnod, 1925.

Modern art

1905 to 1950. Wild color, broken forms, and art about its own time.

• Fauvism1905 to 1910

  Pure, wild color that shocked Paris. Began: the Salon d'Automne, 1905.

• Expressionism1905 to 1933

  Inner feeling turned outward in color and distortion. Began: Die Brücke, Dresden, 1905.

  • Die Brücke, 1905 to 1913. Raw color and jagged woodcuts.
  • Austrian Expressionism, 1908 to 1925. Raw nerves and twisting bodies.
  • Der Blaue Reiter, 1911 to 1914. Color as a spiritual language: blue horses and the first abstractions.
• Cubism1907 to 1925

  Objects broken into planes and seen from many sides at once. Began: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907; named in 1908.

  • Czech Cubism, 1910 to 1920. Prague takes Cubism into painting, furniture and buildings.
  • Synthetic Cubism, 1912 to 1919. Collage and bright, flat shapes: the object rebuilt.
  • Orphism, 1912 to 1914. Cubism dissolved into rhythms of pure color.
  • Section d'Or, 1911 to 1914. Cubism made public, mathematical and large.
• Futurism1909 to 1944

  Speed, machines and the city in motion. Began: Marinetti's Futurist manifesto, Le Figaro, 1909.

• Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde1910 to 1932

  Painters of the Russian Empire and the early Soviet years who pushed past Cubism and Futurism into pure abstraction. Began: the Jack of Diamonds exhibition, Moscow, 1910.

  • Cubo-Futurism, 1912 to 1915. Cubist fragments and Futurist speed.
  • Suprematism, 1915 to 1930. Pure geometric forms floating on white.
  • Constructivism, 1915 to 1934. Art as engineering, for a new society.
• Abstract art1906 to today

  Painting freed from the need to depict anything at all. Began: Kandinsky, Kupka, Delaunay and Mondrian, c. 1910–1914; Hilma af Klint privately from 1906.

  • De Stijl, 1917 to 1931. Primary colors, black lines and the grid.
  • Bauhaus, 1919 to 1933. The school where art, craft and design met.
• American Modernism1908 to 1945

  Skyscrapers, flowers and machines seen with new clarity. Began: Stieglitz's gallery 291, from 1908; the Armory Show, 1913.

  • Precisionism, 1918 to 1940. Factories and cities in clean, hard-edged geometry.
• Harlem Renaissance1918 to 1940

  A flowering of Black art, music and letters. Began: the 1920s, centered in Harlem.

• American Scene1920 to 1945

  Main streets, farms and factories, painted plainly and for everyone. Began: c. 1920s–1940s.

  • Regionalism, 1928 to 1945. The rural Midwest as the heart of America.
  • WPA art, 1933 to 1943. Posters, prints, murals and the Index of American Design, made on the government payroll.