This timeline follows the history of art through nineteen periods, from the painted caves of prehistory to contemporary art. Each period gets its dates, a plain definition, the artists who define it, and a link to the page that goes deeper on that movement.
Every period was a reply to the one before it. Gothic gave way to the Renaissance, Realism prepared the ground for Impressionism, and the line runs on to the present, which is why the order matters more than any single date.
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Most of these names were chosen by people who came long after the periods they describe. Giorgio Vasari wrote of a rinascita, a rebirth of the arts, in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1550. It took the French historian Jules Michelet, in 1855, to turn the word Renaissance into the name of an age, and Jacob Burckhardt, in 1860, to make it stick. By then the painters it describes had been dead for more than three centuries.
The Renaissance, at least, got a flattering name. Four others on this line began as insults, thrown by critics who disliked what they were looking at, and one of them was invented in front of a single sculpture in a crowded gallery room.
The order is the part worth keeping. The dates are only handles, and the names are the opinions of people who came later.
What You'll Discover
The whole sequence in one paragraph.
The names that began as insults.
The dates that never line up.
The best place to start.
What are the periods of art history, in order?
Prehistoric, ancient, Byzantine, medieval and Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, abstract art, Pop art, and contemporary art.
That makes nineteen names, each one answering the one before it. There is no official count, and textbooks split and merge these periods differently, but nineteen covers most of the names met in a general museum.
Which period names began as insults?
Gothic began as a dismissal. Vasari, the same man who wrote of a rebirth, looked at medieval building and blamed the Goths, the barbarians who had sacked Rome, for everything he found ugly in it. To call a cathedral Gothic was to call it barbarian.
Baroque has a similar record. Until the late nineteenth century critics used it for art that looked strange, exaggerated or overdecorated by Renaissance standards, and only in 1888 did the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin treat it as a neutral name for a style.
Impressionism came out of a review. Monet had painted Impression, Sunrise in 1872, and when the group held its first exhibition in Paris in 1874, the critic Louis Leroy made fun of the title in the magazine Le Charivari: "Impression! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished!" He then used the word to mock the whole group, and the painters kept it.
Fauvism was coined in front of a sculpture. At the Salon d'Automne of 1905, the critic Louis Vauxcelles walked into a room where a sculpture in the manner of the Renaissance stood hemmed in by violently colored paintings by Matisse and others. "Un Donatello parmi les fauves," he said, a Donatello among the wild beasts. He said it to Matisse first and then printed it in the newspaper Gil Blas, and the label stayed.
Why do the dates never line up?
Every date on this page is a handle. Periods overlap by decades, start earlier in one city than in another, and linger longest far from the capitals. Monet outlives the invention of Cubism by almost two decades, still painting water lilies.
Even the idea of a movement has a birthday. The first movement in the modern sense, artists exhibiting together under one banner, is usually said to be Impressionism, which debuted as a group in 1874. Everything before it was sorted into periods afterward, by historians looking back.
Prehistoric art (before 3000 BC)
Painting begins on cave walls. The cave of Chauvet in France was decorated with mammoths, cave lions and rhinoceroses around thirty thousand years ago, and the bulls of Lascaux followed, roughly seventeen thousand years ago. Nobody knows exactly why they were made.
The start of the line keeps moving backward. Uranium thorium dating of mineral crusts that had formed over paintings in three Spanish caves, among them a hand stencil at Maltravieso, gave a minimum age of more than 64,000 years. That is earlier than the arrival of modern humans in Europe, so the authors of the study argued that Neanderthals made them. Other researchers have since argued that the dating is too old, and the question is still open.
Ancient art (3000 BC to 300 AD)
Egypt fixes the rules, Greece perfects the body, and Rome copies Greece and adds the portrait. Almost everything Western art later argues about starts here.
Greek painting, though, is almost entirely lost, so what is called Greek art today is mostly sculpture and painted pottery, plus Roman copies of vanished originals.
Byzantine art (330 to 1453)
Byzantine art means gold grounds, flat figures, and icons made for prayer rather than realism, and it ruled the Christian East for a thousand years. A gold background in any museum is a descendant of it, and the style survives almost unchanged in Orthodox icon painting.
Medieval and Gothic art (500 to 1400)
Cathedrals, stained glass, and Gothic art slowly teach painting to tell stories again. At the end of the period Giotto gives figures weight and faces feelings, and the door to the Renaissance opens.
Renaissance (1400 to 1530)
The Renaissance brings perspective, anatomy, oil paint, and the idea of the artist as genius. Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael all work within a single generation, often in the same cities, sometimes on the same walls.
North and south solve different problems. Italy wants ideal bodies in measured space, while Flanders, led by Jan van Eyck, wants every thread and every reflection.
Mannerism (1520 to 1600)
After perfection, the next move is to bend it. Mannerism stretches bodies, sharpens colors, and poses everyone a little too elegantly to be real, and El Greco takes it somewhere nobody has followed since.
The word comes from maniera, style for its own sake. For centuries it was said with a sneer, and the period was only taken seriously again in the twentieth century.
Baroque (1600 to 1750)
Drama becomes policy. After the Reformation, the Catholic Church wants Baroque painting to hit like theater, and Caravaggio answers with saints lit like crime scenes. Rembrandt and Vermeer turn the same light onto ordinary Dutch rooms.
Spain runs its own version at court, where Velázquez paints Las Meninas, the picture other painters still argue about four centuries later.
Rococo (1720 to 1780)
Baroque moves from the church to the salon and loses weight. The colors turn pastel and the subjects become swings, picnics and flirtation, and Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard paint an aristocracy that has no idea what is coming.
The backlash is built in. Diderot is already calling for moral seriousness in the 1760s, and the Revolution finishes the argument.
Neoclassicism (1760 to 1830)
The Revolution wants Roman virtue, straight lines, and moral seriousness, and Neoclassicism delivers. David paints oaths and assassinations, and Ingres draws like a scalpel.
It is also the first period driven by archaeology. Pompeii is being dug up while these painters work, and Europe falls in love with the ancient world all over again.
Romanticism (1800 to 1850)
Feeling takes over from reason, in storms, shipwrecks and nightmares. Goya is its darkest case, painting witches and war from a house whose walls he covered in black, while Delacroix brings the color and the barricades.
Its favorite subject is nature at scale, with Friedrich standing small figures in fog and Turner dissolving ships in storms. Man is small and the world enormous.
Realism (1840 to 1880)
Realism paints ordinary life at the scale reserved for kings. Courbet shows stone breakers and a provincial funeral, and the Salon calls it an insult. It turns out to be the century's most radical move.
Photography arrives in the same decades, which sharpens the question underneath everything: if a machine can record the world, what is painting for? Every movement after this is one answer or another.
Impressionism (1860 to 1886)
Impressionism means painting fast, outdoors, in front of the thing itself. Monet chases light for sixty years, and Renoir and Degas take the method to cafes and dance rehearsals. Within a decade, the critic's joke was the most influential painting movement in Europe.
Post-Impressionism (1886 to 1905)
Post-Impressionism keeps the freedom and adds structure and feeling. Van Gogh turns color into emotion, Cézanne into architecture, and Gauguin into escape, while Seurat rebuilds light dot by dot with pointillism.
Fauvism and Expressionism (1905 to 1930)
Fauvism makes Matisse and his friends wild beasts for their color. In the north, Munch and Expressionism use the same violence for the inner life.
Cubism (1907 to 1920)
Cubism breaks objects into facets and shows several viewpoints at once. Picasso and Braque invent it in a Paris studio, though who invented it first is a story of its own, and almost every abstract movement since owes them the permission.
Its shock wave is hard to overstate. Within a decade, painters in Italy, Russia, and Holland were building their own abstractions on the cubist scaffolding.
Surrealism (1924 to 1950)
Surrealism takes dreams seriously and paints them with a straight face. Dalí melts watches, and Magritte paints pipes that are not pipes.
It was also run like a political party, with a manifesto, official members, and expulsions. André Breton wrote the first manifesto in 1924 and policed who belonged.
Abstract art (1910 to 1970)
Abstract art drops the subject entirely. Kandinsky gets there around 1910, and by mid century Pollock is dripping paint on the floor while Rothko is staining canvases the size of doors.
The center of gravity also crosses the Atlantic here. After 1945, for the first time in centuries, the story of painting runs through New York instead of Paris.
Pop art (1955 to 1970)
Pop art brings soup cans and comic strips into the museum. Warhol and Lichtenstein paint them at the scale once kept for saints and kings, and ask why a soup can should rank below a water lily.
It also ends the idea that a subject can be too low for art, an argument that began with Courbet's provincial funeral a century earlier.
Contemporary art (1970 to now)
There is no single style, which is the style: installation, performance, video, and painting again.
Ai Weiwei, Yayoi Kusama, and Banksy work at the far end of the same line that began in a cave.
What is the best order to learn art history?
Start at the beginning and go in order, because each period reacts to the one before it. Read the sequence once for the order, then pick the period that pulls hardest and follow its link outward, forward and back.
A full plan is laid out in how to learn art history, and a shorter guide, how to appreciate art, covers standing in front of the real thing. For reading, best art history books rounds up the titles worth the time, and best art history newsletters the inboxes.
Other stories pick up threads from this line: the first and last paintings of 13 famous artists, ten artists to know, the true story behind Hokusai's Great Wave, twelve impressionist facts, and who painted the first still life.
About the Author
Julien Charles-Césari is a French art writer who tells the stories behind famous paintings and the lives of the artists who made them.
He created Cool Stories About Art on Instagram, followed by more than 320,000 people, and this Substack, where more than 200,000 subscribers learn art the fun way.
He also created Cool Stories About History, a Substack about the stories behind history. His book Destins d'artistes is published by Larousse.
