Middle Ages to Baroque

Romanesque art

Romanesque art flourished from about 1000 to around 1200; its images show strictly ordered, often oversized holy figures.

💡 Did you know? The name only appeared in the nineteenth century, because the art recalled ancient Rome.

Gothic art

It arose around 1140 in the region around Paris and spread across Europe until the fifteenth century.

💡 Did you know? Renaissance scholars gave it the name as an insult: they thought the style as barbaric as the Goths.

Byzantine art

It arose in the Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, and lives on today in Greek and Russian icon painting.

💡 Did you know? During the Iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries, religious images were at times banned and destroyed.

Early Netherlandish painting

The Ghent Altarpiece by the van Eyck brothers, completed in 1432, is considered one of its masterpieces.

💡 Did you know? For a long time Jan van Eyck was said to have invented oil painting; in fact he only refined it masterfully.

Renaissance

Supported by wealthy families such as the Medici, artists rediscovered the body, space and nature.

💡 Did you know? The word means rebirth; as early as 1550 Giorgio Vasari wrote of the “rinascita” of the arts.

High Renaissance

Its centres were Florence and above all the Rome of Popes Julius II and Leo X.

💡 Did you know? Around 1504 Leonardo and Michelangelo were both working in Florence on battle scenes for the same hall in the Palazzo Vecchio.

Mannerism

The name comes from the Italian “maniera”, an artist’s personal style.

💡 Did you know? El Greco, who worked in Toledo, is often counted among its late exponents.

Baroque

After the Reformation the Catholic Church used the overwhelming effect of this art to inspire the faithful.

💡 Did you know? The word probably comes from the Portuguese “barroco”, an irregularly shaped pearl.

Caravaggism

They imitated Caravaggio: dramatic light out of darkness and saints with the faces of ordinary people.

💡 Did you know? Honthorst painted so many candlelit night scenes that in Italy he was called “Gherardo delle Notti”.

Rococo

Antoine Watteau and François Boucher also belong to it; the style conquered the salons and palaces of the nobility.

💡 Did you know? The name goes back to “rocaille”, the shell-like ornament of the period.

Sfumato

The Italian word means roughly “smoked”; Leonardo achieved it with many wafer-thin layers of paint.

💡 Did you know? Measurements showed that some of these layers are only a few thousandths of a millimetre thick.

Linear perspective

Leon Battista Alberti set down the rules in 1435 in his book “De pictura”.

💡 Did you know? Masaccio’s Holy Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella is considered one of the first pictures to apply it strictly.

Triptych

The central panel is usually twice as wide as the wings; when closed, their outer sides often show a picture of their own.

💡 Did you know? Modern painters took up the format too, for instance Francis Bacon for some of his best-known works.

Contrapposto

The weight rests on one leg, hips and shoulders tilt in opposite directions, and the figure looks alive.

💡 Did you know? The Italian word means roughly “set against” or “counterpoise”.

Trompe-l’œil

Painted architecture, windows or objects look so real that you take them for the real thing.

💡 Did you know? The French expression literally means “deceive the eye”.

Tenebrism

The name comes from the Italian “tenebroso”, dark or gloomy.

💡 Did you know? The style became especially popular in Spain; the young Velázquez painted this way in Seville too.