The art of painting encompasses all forms of applying pigments to a surface in order to produce images with decorative value, representational value, or both. At its most basic level, the act of painting consists of two components: \Tdrawing\t, or the conscious design of a pictorial image; and the use of color or hues and light tones to augment the beauty or effectiveness of the image. Although some modern painters, such as the abstract expressionists, have dispensed with the drawing component, most painters throughout the history of Western civilization have used color and line to explore the outer world of natural things and events and the inner, private world of feelings and fantasies. For considerations of non-Western painting, see articles elsewhere in the encyclopedia, as follows: \TAfrican art\t; \TChinese art and architecture\t; \TIndian art and architecture\t; \TIndians of North America, Art of the\t; \TIslamic art and architecture\t; \TJapanese art and architecture\t; \TLatin American art and architecture\t; \TMogul art and architecture\t; \TPersian art and architecture\t; \Tpre-Columbian art and architecture\t.

Prehistoric and Ancient Painting

The earliest painted images still extant, the rock paintings discovered in caves in Lascaux, France, and in Altamira, Spain, probably were created as magic talismans to ensure a fruitful hunt. Executed perhaps 15,000 years ago, the bulls, horses, and deer depicted on the cave walls still retain an animation and vitality imparted by bold contours and crudely powerful forms (see \Tprehistoric art\t).

Egypt was the earliest historical culture of the Western world to produce an important body of painting (see \TEgyptian art and architecture\t). Isolated by desert and sea in a corner of northern Africa, Egyptian civilization developed along fairly stable lines for fully three millennia, beginning about 3000 BC. Although not without subtle changes over the centuries, Egyptian painting reflects the deeply rooted traditions of its culture in the iconographic conventions that govern its images. These conventions--visual signs that represent real objects and relationships--often approximate but rarely reproduce the actual qualities of the real world; rather, they form an internally cohesive system that, once grasped, makes the work comprehensible. The 18th-Dynasty Fowling Scene (1570-1349 BC; British Museum, London), for example, can be read by its conceptual logic rather than its perceptual fidelity: the central figure is larger than the rest because he is more important. Reflecting the artist's concern with choosing the most easily understood presentation for each anatomical part rather than with mirroring reality, the figure's legs, arms, and head are shown in profile, whereas the torso and eye are depicted frontally. Funerary paintings commemorate or re-create the lives of dead noblemen or pharaohs in a monumental style that expresses the belief in a timeless hereafter.

Virtually nothing remains of the painting of the various Mesopotamian civilizations that rose and fell during the Egyptian era (see \TMesopotamian art and architecture\t). A radically different aesthetic concept does appear, however, in the surviving fragments of frescoes and mosaics executed by Cretan artists of the Minoan civilization that flourished about 2000 BC. In these works, the rigid conventions of Egyptian painting give way to fluid design and spirited action (see \TMinoan art\t). The immediacy and directly representational emphasis of Minoan painting were developed in \TGreek art\t, but, unfortunately, all large-scale Greek painting has been lost. Written accounts of Greek artists, however, as well as a considerable body of painted vases, reveal the increasing naturalism of Greek painting, culminating in such early-5th-century BC examples as the Battle between Lapiths and Centaurs on a krater by the Kleophrades Painter (c.460-450 BC; Metropolitan Museum, New York City). The powerful treatment of anatomy intimates a new and different world view--one in which the timeless and hierarchical Egyptian conception of humankind yields to a recognition of the flux and activity of life.

Through the medium of Hellenistic art, the vitality and naturalism of Greek painting greatly influenced \TRoman art and architecture\t. Roman wall paintings and mosaics reveal sophisticated experiments with the creation of illusionistic depth and the suggestion of realistic atmosphere and lighting--obvious concerns of painters attempting to represent objective reality with accuracy.

Early Christian and Byzantine Painting

The coming of the Christian era and the dissolution of the ancient civilizations brought profound changes in the style and purpose of painting. Christian culture, like that of Egypt, was concerned with the symbolic importance of worldly things, not with their physical appearance. Accordingly, \TEarly Christian art and architecture\t and \TByzantine art and architecture\t tended toward the static, hierarchical, and convention-governed style of Egyptian painting, although the naturalism and representational bias of classical painting was never completely absent from Christian art. Church decoration was generally done in \Tmosaic\t, which in art history is considered a form of painting.

For the first 1,000 years of Christian civilization in western Europe, \Tilluminated manuscripts\t were the principal medium for painted images. In Ireland, where classical art had little or no influence, manuscripts were produced during the 7th and 8th centuries with incredibly detailed designs that interlaced abstract line and color with stylized animal motifs, as in the \TBook of Kells\t (c.760-820; Trinity College, Dublin). Equally beautiful illuminations, although more influenced by Byzantine and classical art, were produced in the 9th and 10th centuries in the continental centers of \TCarolingian\t and \TOttonian art and architecture\t.

Gothic and Flemish Painting

By the end of the 14th century \TGothic art and architecture\t, radiating outward from France, had fostered the development of a progressively more precise and articulate naturalism that recorded the subtleties of light and atmosphere and reintroduced human figures whose grace and elegance are epitomized in the \TInternational Style\t in art. This gradual reinvention of the classical principles of direct representation was particularly advanced in early-15th-century northern Europe, where a profoundly original style and technique evolved in Flemish art. Paintings on the manuscript page began to assume internally consistent spatial systems. Even more important, painters discovered new purposes for their art, such as altarpieces and portraits, and new patrons to commission their efforts in the growing bourgeois class. The result was the rise of panel painting and a new quest for the accurate depiction of the objective world, which reflected the materialist concerns of the merchant-patrons. Aiding these new trends immensely was the development of oil glazes, which permitted a far more exact registration of light and color than could be had from \Tfresco\t or \Ttempera\t painting.

The revolutionary character of 15th-century Flemish painting is well represented in Jan van \TEyck\t'S Wedding of the Arnolfini (1434; National Gallery, London), which depicts a newly married couple bathed in rich, mellow light. Each detail is described with exactitude, and the individual texture of each surface is displayed. By uniting a classical concern for naturalism and spatial depth to the Christian idea that every physical object has transcendent importance, Flemish painters developed a radically new style of painting (see \TFlemish art and architecture\t).

The Italian Renaissance

In Italy, painting through most of the Gothic era reflected Byzantine influence. Gold-leaf backgrounds and stylized drapery folds were characteristic of iconographical panel paintings (see \Ticonography\t). By the beginning of the 14th century the gradual growth of Renaissance humanism had begun to influence Italian painters (see \TItalian art and architecture\t). These emergent ideas inspired the Renaissance.

The first landmark of \TRenaissance art and architecture\t was \TGiotto di Bondone\t'S Lamentation (1304-13; Arena Chapel, Padua), in which the modeling of the heavy, folded drapery clothing the figures is combined with a dramatic positioning of the figures to create the impression of weight and three-dimensionality in a stagelike space. Along with \TDuccio\t, Simone \TMartini\t, and other 14th-century Italian painters, Giotto introduced into Italian painting those elements of drama, monumentality, and coherent spatiality that would characterize almost all Italian Renaissance painting.

The ruling members of the Italian city-states competed with each other for the services of noted artists, who, for the first time, were sought after as creators rather than employed as mere artisans. Florence, a noted center of the arts since the days of Giotto and Dante, led the way in the early 15th century with important advances in the mathematical and optical simulation of the space of the world--in other words, in \Tperspective\t. The revolutionary experiments in perspective and pictorial drama represented in the works of \TMasaccio\t in the 1420s were elaborated by later painters such as Fra \TAngelico\t, whose fresco The Annunciation (1438-45; San Marco, Florence) uses an architectural setting as a means for establishing spatial order, with each column on the left marking a regular spatial unit back into the illusionary space. This mathematically based perspective system is known as linear perspective.

Renaissance artists also studied anatomy and evolved new ways to show figures in action. The frozen figures of Giotto or the contemplative ones of Fra Angelico gave way to the vitality of Antonio del Pollaiuolo's (see \TPollaiuolo family\t) Saint Sebastian (1475; National Gallery, London) and the muscular animation of \TMichelangelo\t'S overwhelming ceiling frescoes in the \TSistine Chapel\t (1508-12; Vatican City). \TRaphael\t'S School of Athens (1510-11; Stanza della Signatura, Vatican palace) is one of many frescoes done by papal commission between 1490 and 1520. Its architectural setting provides another instance of a spatial "window" that seems to demand that the viewer look through, rather than at, the painting's surface. Although the growing freedom of the artist, a concern for coherent pictorial space, and the development of portraiture allied Florentine and Roman Renaissance painting to Flemish art, the Italian emphasis on monumentality rather than on detail and the preference for fresco rather than oil differentiated it from northern European painting. The full potential of oil paint was finally realized in the radiant atmospheric color developed by such early-16th-century Venetian painters as \TTitian\t and \TGiorgione\t, who realized the potential of color as an expressive tool. Shape, line, contour--the tools of precision and clarity in pictorial representation--give way in the works of the Venetians to the deep shadows and resonances of Giorgione's Fete Champetre (c.1510; Louvre, Paris).

As the 16th century progressed, a late Renaissance style, sometimes called \TMannerism\t, emerged. Mannerism is exemplified in the works of \TRosso Fiorentino\t and \TPontormo\t, in which the classical proportions of the figures become exaggerated, the colors harsh, and the composition agitated and asymmetrical, as if in response to subjective pressures. In Spain, the Greek-born \TEl Greco\t worked in a distinctly personal version of the Mannerist style.

Northern Renaissance and Baroque

In Germany, the importation of Italian ideas helped to form the style of Albrecht \TDurer\t, the preeminent master outside Italy at the time of the High Renaissance and a major influence on all northern European artists. Later in the 16th century the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder's (see \TBruegel\t family) Mannerist depictions of peasant life expanded the range of subjects available to painters, just as Hieronymus \TBosch\t's bizarre pictures had earlier legitimatized the pictorial rendering of inner fantasies.

During the 17th century, \Tbaroque art and architecture\t dominated European painting. Baroque paintings often exploited strong directional light and asymmetrical compositions to achieve dramatic illusionistic effects (see illusionism), typically using a diagonal sweep into deep space. In Italy, \TCaravaggio\t masterfully used \Tchiaroscuro\t (contrasts of light and dark) to achieve the convincing tactility of his robust, earthy figures. The large scale of 17th-century Italian painting--a heritage of the monumental frescoes of Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo and \TLeonardo da Vinci\t--was also important in the flamboyant aesthetics of the baroque. Broader brushstrokes, with resultant blurred contours, became the hallmark of a painterly style that contrasted vividly with Renaissance linearity--that is, the artist's skill in the use of paint became more important than skill in drawing.

Considerable differences in national as well as personal style characterize the painters of the baroque era, which coincided with the final breakup of medieval Christendom along religious and nationalistic lines. Dynamic energy and elaborate action combine with fluid handling in the Flemish painter Peter Paul \TRubens\t's many large canvases, whereas the classical repose of the Frenchman Nicolas \TPoussin\t's cool, pensive depictions of mythological subjects recalls the order and serenity of Renaissance masters. With the founding (1648) of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculture (see \Tacademies of art\t) in Paris came the beginning of the codification and institutionalization of Renaissance ideas that was to guide, then smother, later generations of French artists.

In Roman Catholic southern Europe, baroque painters exhibited a grandness of scale and treatment, reflecting the extraordinary influence of Michelangelo, that was used to advance aggressively the ideals of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. Painters from the Protestant north, however, explored new secular motifs. The delicate light of Jan \TVermeer\t, which illuminates small-scale works depicting domestic life in mid-17th-century households, seems capable of infinite subtlety. \TRembrandt\t'S Self-Portrait (1669; National Gallery, London), in contrast, makes full use of deep golden tones and warm browns to reveal the essential humanity and introspective personality of the artist. Other 17th-century Dutch artists, most notably Jacob van \TRuisdael\t and Jan \TSteen\t, reflected a recognition that many commonplace aspects of the world were worthy of depiction by elevating \Tgenre painting\t and \Tlandscape painting\t to esteemed roles in European art.

Neoclassicism and Romanticism

During the 18th century, Paris rose in importance in European painting as the dramatic baroque gave way to the decorative \Trococo style\t of light and elegance. Rococo artists frequently portrayed pastoral subjects in aristocratic and decorative terms, as in Antoine \TWatteau\t's A Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717; Louvre, Paris). In England, Sir Joshua \TReynolds\t, the first president of the Royal Academy (founded 1768), reflected in his "grand manner" the rococo conception of ideal forms.

Eventually, the lightness of the rococo style degenerated into frivolity, and serious-minded painters, inspired by the momentous events of the French Revolution, pursued the more lofty ideals of \Tneoclassicism\t and \Tromanticism\t, both of which evolved in France in the late 18th century. Set in the context of the French Revolution, Jacques Louis \TDavid\t's painting took on political significance, as opposed to what was perceived as the self-indulgence and aristocratic sensuality of the rococo ancien regime. David's ideals, developed further by his gifted pupil Jean Auguste Dominique \TIngres\t, eventually froze into rigid academic prescriptions that came to stifle officially sanctioned French art.

Romanticism opened to pictorial exploration the subjective emotions and visions of individual personalities. The world of the mythic imagination is central to the works of William \TBlake\t, whereas Eugene \TDelacroix\t explored the exoticism of distant lands, the primal powers of animals, and the image-rich tales of tragedy. Germany produced the eerie symbolic landscapes of Caspar David \TFriedrich\t, while in Spain Francisco de \TGoya\t confronted and pursued the dark and destructive side of human nature.

With the elevation of the individual sensibility in the romantic era came a new freedom in the techniques of painting. Nowhere was this freedom in handling more arresting than in the romantic landscapes of the English painters John \TConstable\t and J. M. W. \TTurner\t. Constable's small oil sketches may be regarded as fresh and unpretentious investigations into the look of landscape; yet they are rendered with broad, free brushstrokes that impart an intensely personal visual poetry to these unassuming themes. Turner took this approach to an extreme, making palpable the atmosphere and light of nature in an exuberant and unrestrained handling of color and form (see \TEnglish art and architecture\t).

Realism and Impressionism

In the middle of the 19th century neoclassicism and romanticism were challenged by essentially new aesthetic currents in France (see \TFrench art and architecture\t). Gustave \TCourbet\t's realism rejected both the exoticism of the romantics and the idealism of the classicists in favor of an art that portrayed ordinary people leading ordinary, unromantic lives. Building on Courbet's defiance of the ideal and the sublime, a group of artists in Paris in the 1860s began to formulate a completely new theory of pictorial representation. At this time society's conception of the artist began to change, as did the artist's self-conception. A rift developed separating a conservative public and the conservative academies from the young and rebellious artists who were determined to experiment with new possibilities in painting. These avant-gardists challenged the public to accept radical changes in style. The pattern that emerged of movements and manifestos and "-isms" is to some extent the story of modern painting up to the present day.

The modern stereotype of artists as cultural leaders unaccepted by their reactionary audience harks back to Edouard \TManet\t, whose Dejeuner sur I'herbe (1863; Louvre, Paris) was rejected for exhibition by the state-sanctioned \TSalon\t; it was then shown in a defiant exhibition mounted expressly to display works refused by the Salon. Manet's nude figures were deemed "not proper" because they were shown as ordinary people rather than as Greek goddesses or exotic odalisques.

Inspired by Manet and Edgar \TDegas\t, a group of young artists who were labeled impressionists by a hostile critic went even further. For Claude \TMonet\t, the prime exponent of \Timpressionism\t, the world was composed not of objects to conceive but of reflected light to perceive. Painting en plein air (out-of-doors) rather than in the confines of a studio, he worked directly on the canvas without preliminary sketches.

Toward the end of the 19th century, Georges \TSeurat\t attempted to render scientifically the impressionist perception of light with the use of small dabs or dots of paint in a style called pointillism (see \Tneoimpressionism\t). Paul \TCezanne\t developed painted analogues for the structure of the material world, eschewing the atmospheric dissolution of objects in impressionist painting, and Vincent \Tvan Gogh\t explored the emotionally seething inner world of the psyche (see \Tpostimpressionism\t).

Modern Painting

The first decade of the 20th century brought an explosion of artistic experimentation in Paris that soon pervaded artistic thought throughout Europe and North America. The impressionist and postimpressionist masters pointed the way for a new generation to follow.

Of the various schools of painting that coalesced in the early decades of the 20th century, including \TFauvism\t, \Texpressionism\t, and \Tfuturism\t, the movement that was to have the greatest impact on subsequent painting was \Tcubism\t. Developed simultaneously by Pablo \TPicasso\t and Georges \TBraque\t, cubism considered the nature of space and the construction of objects from a position of detached analysis. Picasso's Girl with a Mandolin (1910; Nelson Rockefeller Collection), for example, reduces the human form to a series of angular, interpenetrating brown and gray planes. The figure appears recomposed in a fluctuating spatial environment, as if to suggest that the painter has penetrated to a timeless structure beneath the appearance of reality.

By reordering reality according to the wishes of the artist, the cubists prepared the way for truly \Tabstract art\t--that is, paintings based entirely on subjective conceptions, with no reference to the objective world. Both Wassily \TKandinsky\t (from 1910 on) and Piet \TMondrian\t (from c.1916 on) created strictly nonobjective paintings in which even the tenuous cubist connection with perceived reality was severed.

Another vein of \Tmodern art\t was explored in the 1920s by the proponents of \Tsurrealism\t, for whom the images generated by dreams and the subconscious had a potent reality surpassing that of conscious life. The formulation of that reality in visible form is the goal of such surrealist works as Salvador DALI'S Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War (1936; Philadelphia Museum of Art).

In the United States the stylistic revolutions in Paris gradually came to supplant the native tradition of naturalism represented in the 19th-century works of Winslow \THomer\t, Thomas \TEakins\t, and the members of the \THudson River school\t and the related movement called \TLuminism\t (see \TAmerican art and architecture\t).

As the European movements lost cohesion, American painters combined various principles of surrealism and nonobjectivity into a new aesthetic synthesis that made New York the artistic center of the Western world. Calling their synthesis \Tabstract expressionism\t, young American painters of the 1940s and '50s used large canvases and energetic brushstrokes and dribbled paint to create works that could be taken either as the record of the creative act or as forceful, cogent form rendered simply for its own sake.

Representation had been absent long enough from American art for the reintroduction of recognizable images and objects to be an important event of the 1960s.  \Tpop art\t, which was invented by British artist Richard \THamilton\t in 1956, combined common objects and revered stereotypes of popular culture to satirize the artificial, mass-produced quality of consumer society.

The fertile 1960s also produced \Top art\t--visually startling works that depend on optics for their effects.  At the same time, cool and emotionally remote nonobjective paintings further explored the possibilities of color (see \TColor-field painting\t) and largeness of scale.  Then, toward the end of the 1960s and through the 1980s, realist painting emerged once again as \Tphotorealism\t.  At the same time, the \Tneoexpressionism\t that flourished in Europe--in the work of the German Anselm Kiefer, for example, or the Italian Sandro Chia--began to be seen in works by American painters such as Julian Schnabel. \TRoger\t \TBaldwin\t

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