This guide follows painting through twenty movements, from medieval altarpieces to Pop Art, in the order they happened. Each entry gives the movement in a few lines, the painting that shows it best and a link to twelve more, with four extra movements that sit outside the chain at the end.
Every movement on this line began as an answer to the one before it. The Renaissance answered the flat gold of the Middle Ages, the Baroque answered the Renaissance's calm with drama, and the line runs on across most of a millennium to Warhol's soup cans, so the order shows what each one was pushing against.
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The line looks tidier than it was. Almost none of the painters on it knew which movement they belonged to, because most of the names were handed out afterwards by critics and historians, and several began as insults. Medieval painters did not know they were Gothic, and Caravaggio did not know he was Baroque. The man who painted The Starry Night died in 1890, twenty years before anyone called him a Post Impressionist, a word invented in London in 1910 by the critic Roger Fry.
That does not make the order false. Each movement really did push against the one before, and the push is why the pictures look the way they do. What changes is how the borders should be held, loosely, as labels chosen later by someone else. In six of the entries below, the story of the name is the best part.
What You'll Discover
Who put the Goths in Gothic.
When the Baroque got its name.
What a critic wrote about Monet's sunrise.
When Van Gogh became a Post Impressionist.
What a critic saw beside a statue.