All cultures throughout history have produced art. The impulse to create, to realize form and order out of mere matter--to recognize order in the world or to generate it oneself--is universal and perpetual. ASPECTS OF ART Every work of art has two aspects: it is a present experience as well as a record of the past, and it is valued, preserved, and studied for both identities. As present experience, artworks afford people the pleasures, the tensions, the dramas, and ultimately the satisfaction to the senses of pure form--in the visual arts the relationships among colors, lines, and masses in space. Art History and Its Methods The meaning of the word art, derived from the Latin ars, meaning "skill," has changed through history. In medieval Europe, proficiency in the "liberal arts" was the goal of an educated person; only by the 19th century did the word come to denote painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts, and decorative arts. A distinction then arose between artist and artisan, the latter denoting a skilled manual worker, the former connoting capacity for imaginative invention. Although the arts may be taken today as comprising the musical and verbal as well as the visual, art or fine arts is usually assumed to mean the visual arts--\Tpainting\t, \Tsculpture\t, \Tarchitecture\t, and, by extension, printmaking, \Tdrawing\t, \Tdecorative arts\t, and \Tphotography\t. The concept of a history of art is relatively recent. In the mid-16th century Giorgio \TVasari\t compiled information about Renaissance artists' lives and works in Lives of the Artists. Modern art history may be thought of as beginning in the mid-18th century with Johann Joachim \TWinckelmann\t, who applied a conception of history as cyclical to what remained of the art of ancient Greece and Rome. From the philosopher G. W. F. \THegel\t onward, much of the theoretical support of art history was supplied by German historians and philosophers. Heinrich \TWolfflin\t provided, in the early 20th century, a technique for understanding style by comparing two works of different periods and noting their differences; this is still the most widely used heuristic (interpretative) approach today. Art history, congealing as a distinct discipline in the humanities in the late 19th century, is now largely non-theoretical. Historians examine works and documents about the works in order to place them appropriately in the present set of recognized groupings. Broadly, the four most general categories for Western art are ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern. In the past, the humanistic, classical art of Greece served as a positive standard by which works were judged. Today, art historians are neutral with regard to different styles--none is superior or inferior; all are worthy of study. The Visual Media Art has been made for many reasons: for religious devotion, for commemoration of people and events, for adornment of utilitarian objects, for personal expression. It has also been created on many scales: huge cathedrals, large public murals, small private manuscripts, and, most familiar, easel paintings. Perhaps the broadest generalization is that the visual arts are spatial rather than temporal. Music and literature must be experienced serially in time; the visual arts must of necessity be experienced in space. In painting, space is an illusion--an indication of three dimensions in two. This is rendered by conventions understood by the work's audience, and conventions vary in different periods and places. For example, space can be understood by the overlap of shapes (the shape partly imposed on another is in front); by the location of shapes in relation to one another (the shape higher up is farther away); by the lightening and graying of tones to simulate atmospheric effects in nature; or by a complex mathematical system by which is determined the size diminution of objects as they increase in distance from the picture plane toward a theoretically infinite vanishing point on the horizon (see \Tperspective\t). Sculpture can represent three dimensions in three dimensions and (except in the case of relief sculpture, such as \Tbas-relief\t, which partakes of both actual and illusionary depth) is best seen from a moving vantage point. In this way the volumes that make up the work are continually rediscovered in new and interesting interactions with the surrounding voids. Architecture is also three-dimensional, but with an entirely different effect from that of sculpture. Architecture encloses spaces, and defines and orders them, to the advantage of various human activities that take place within them. As one moves around and through an architectural environment, spaces appear and disappear, generating reactions by virtue of their scale and structure. To some degree, the physical materials used by artists influence the properties of the resulting work. A FRESCO \Tpainting\t (pigments applied to a wet plaster wall) will have different visual properties from an oil painting on canvas (see \Tpainting techniques\t), and an oil painting will have different properties from a \Twatercolor\t on paper. A sculpture modeled in wax and then cast in bronze (\Tlost-wax process\t) will differ in effect from one carved directly out of stone or wood (see \Twood carving\t). The multifarious materials at the disposal of the architect determine both the expressive tenor and structural limitations of a building. In short, great art is in harmony with its medium. Experiencing the Arts Today Today the arts are more accessible than ever before. Most metropolitan areas have at least one art museum, and the dissemination of all the visual arts through photographic reproduction has brought the most remote works to a convenient coffee table. Works known second hand through reproductions, however, are only ghosts of their real selves, and one must then try to construct in one's imagination their true appearance and effect. Since the artwork exists as a physical artifact with special properties, it has become a rarity in short supply and high demand. In a society that values things in terms of money, the artwork takes on great importance as a precious object. Every day brings news of astounding auction prices or astounding museum thefts, and original works are often seen only behind plexiglass and in the company of guards. Further, \Tart criticism\t and the history of art can often seem an exotic and arcane region of intellectual sophistication, where lofty decisions about quality and importance are made and passed down to a wider audience. This notion is misleading. The accessibility of art means its cultural and intellectual accessibility as well. Furthermore, historians are becoming more and more interested in types of art previously ignored because they have been termed "popular"; also, so-called high art is now more and more present in almost everyone's life. A museum should exist to bring art experience to its public, not to sequester precious objects. The critic's role is to expand in others their capacity for response to a work by making trenchant observation and analysis of it, not by pronouncing judgments from on high. HISTORY OF WESTERN ART \TStonehenge\t on the Salisbury Plain in England is the remaining monument of a prehistoric people now otherwise unknown. Built c.2000 BC, the post-and-lintel circles of massive rock testify that--even at the earliest stages of a civilization--the altering of the earth itself, the defining of space, and the ordering of space in regular sets of relationships are the ways by which people can bring order to their lives and common focus to their society. This monument's actual intent was functional rather than artistic, like most \Tprehistoric art\t. The cave paintings of \TLascaux\t in France and \TAltamira\t in Spain, or fertility figures such as the \TVenus of Willendorf\t from Austria, far older than Stonehenge, have in common with it a significance and even necessity in the rituals and beliefs of their makers. For more detailed consideration of prehistoric art--and the art and architecture of non-Western cultures and nations--see individual articles by country, by style, by type, by artist, and by building or monument. The Ancient World The advanced social, political, religious, and linguistic structures that constitute Western civilization appeared first in Mesopotamia and Egypt around the beginning of the third millennium BC. Egypt remained relatively stable as a state for the better part of 3,000 years and was able to generate and maintain a distinctive artistic style in all media. The monumental style of Egyptian art (see \TEgypt, ancient\t) is most powerful in 4th-dynasty sculpture, such as the seated pharaoh Khafre in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. The figure seems contained, as if still confined within the block from which it was carved. The style and its formal properties make sense when seen in light of the beliefs to which the style is responsive. The sculpture was, in effect, a new and immortal dwelling for the spirit of the dead pharaoh, and as such was beyond the world. Egyptian architecture includes not only the great \Tpyramids\t at Giza but also a number of \Ltemple\ls featuring long, low colonnades deployed on a central axis line, as at the temple complexes at \TKarnak\t (c.1570-1085 BC) and \TLuxor\t (c.1570- 1200 BC). The temples were built so that the interior captures one's architectural interest as one proceeds from chamber to chamber, each more protected and secret than the one before. Incorporated in these massive architectural monuments were miles of wall paintings and relief sculptures. Much less stable than Egypt were the several civilizations of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, and hence their art is more various. The extensive reliefs that adorned royal palaces like that of Ashurnasirpal II at \TNimrud\t (9th century BC) have a firmness and authority of execution and cogent use of conventional stylizations--particularly in the musculature of the animals and men, the profile eyes, and the repeated contour lines of the horses--that are the hallmarks of a mature style. The imagery of the reliefs--the ruler's prowess as a warrior--reflects the concern with which these often warring states treated arms and power. At the opposite pole from these monuments of public propaganda were tiny mementos of individual distinction--cylinder seals, usually of semiprecious stone and about 2.5 cm (1 in) long, carved to leave an imprint of a god or mythological figure when rolled in soft clay. Contemporary with the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent were the \TAegean\t \Lcivilization\ls of the Minoans on the island of Crete and the Mycenaeans on the Greek mainland. Relatively little of their art is preserved, but in the fragments of wall paintings and the bright, lively style of Kamares-ware pottery one can sense the ebullient freedom of design and organic motifs that animate \TMinoan art\t. The ruins of their palaces, such as those at \TKnossos\t and \TMycenae\t, give evidence of their highly developed cultures. For many artists and historians of the past, \TGreek art\t was artistic perfection. No other ancient style lingered on in the Western consciousness to reemerge so frequently or to condition aesthetic perception so pervasively. After an era of geometric abstraction in pottery and of archaic freestanding sculpture (korai, or female, and kouroi, or male, figures) that partook of the same monumental abstraction as that of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the golden age of Greek art emerged in the 5th century BC. Of the painting, all that remains are painted vases, many of the highest quality. As in the earlier cultures, architectural monuments and the sculpture that adorned them are the principal surviving achievements. The Parthenon (447-432 BC) incorporates in its design and sculptural embellishments the epitome of the classical style. Located high on the \TAcropolis\t in Athens, this white marble temple dedicated to the goddess Athena is composed of Doric columns surrounding the interior room, or cella, and supporting the architrave and the east and west pediments, which once held the principal sculptures. All architectural components are brought into perfect balance to achieve the structure's stately firmness and tranquil grace. The sculptural works of \TPhidias\t and his school, now called the \TElgin Marbles\t and housed in London's \TBritish Museum\t, use images of the gods to show the idealized human body in motion and at rest. In freestanding sculpture, the stylized and monumental archaic style was replaced in the 5th century BC with one reflecting the natural rhythms of the body as it reacts to gravity. The Hermes Holding the Infant Dionysus of \TPraxiteles\t (4th century BC; Olympia Museum, Greece) is posed in contrapposto, that is, the weight of the body is supported on one leg so that the hips and shoulders slant in opposite directions as a result. The proportions of such figures as this formed a canon that would remain in use hundreds of years later. \TRoman art\t had the same humanistic basis as Greek; in fact, most Greek sculptures are known to us through Roman copies. The realistic portrait sculpture produced by the Romans is important since it superseded the Greek emphasis on the ideal and general to portray the specific and individual. In architecture, new conceptions and new structural possibilities were developed, as shown in the huge domed \TPantheon\t (AD c.118-128) in Rome, now used as a Christian church. The Advent of Christianity During the first centuries of Christianity, the classical world and its styles atrophied as the Western Roman Empire slipped into decline. \TEarly Christian art\t, oriented toward intangible spirituality, developed into the stylized abstraction characteristic of \TByzantine art\t, the product of the flourishing \TByzantine Empire\t, as the Eastern Roman Empire is known. In the West, Christian art proceeded through a series of styles splendidly chronicled in the applied arts--the \LIvor\lies, \LIle\ls, \Lmosaic\ls, METALWORK, \Tilluminated manuscripts\t, and various liturgical implements of the \TMerovingian\t, \TCarolingian\t, and \TOttonian\t periods. Christian architecture, and the sculpture that adorned it, gained prominence in the \TRomanesque\t and \TGothic\t eras. Large churches such as Saint Sernin (11th century) in Toulouse, France, synthesized elements from the earlier Carolingian and Ottonian periods. Romanesque churches employed barrel vaults to support the roof, with heavy masonry walls and \Lbuttress\les. In plan these 11th- and 12th-century structures resembled a cross because the long \Tnave\t was intersected by \Ltransept\ls. Pilgrims could move through the church down side aisles and through the \Lambula\ltory around the periphery of the \Tapse\t, where the \Taltar\t and shrine were housed. The elaborate sculptural programs of the churches represented biblical figures and theological ideas. Although most of the worshipers were probably illiterate, they understood the sculptured scenes well enough. The artists/craftsmen of the Middle Ages charged their relief sculptures with great emotional power, executing them in a style that owes little or nothing to the classical tradition. In the \Ttympanum\t relief (early 12th century) over the west entrance to the Cathedral of Saint Lazare in Autun, France, the saved souls are shown approaching heaven on the left, while on the right devils capture souls as they are torn from their graves at the Last Judgment, a warning to the mortals who pass beneath it into the cathedral. In the later 12th and through the 13th centuries, principally in France, the \Tcathedrals\t were built that still make the Gothic style a feature of the urban landscape. The great height of the nave of \TChartres Cathedral\t (1194-1220) draws the gaze in and up. The arcade, the \Ttriforium\t above it, the \Tclerestory\t windows, and finally the vaulting proceed from one to the next with grace and structural logic, just as the nave continues toward the altar with the regularly spaced intervals of the thick clustered \TPiers\t. \Tstained glass\t in the great windows diffuses a rich and gentle light throughout the nave. Supported externally by flying buttresses, the walls seem fragile and delicate in contrast to both classical and Romanesque styles, and the use of the pointed \Tarch\t throughout emphasizes the cathedral's verticality, as do the various architectural adornments. While at all times compatible with the architecture, the sculpture at Chartres illustrates the variety of sculptural styles that developed in the Gothic era. The west facade displays an orderly array of elongated jamb figures, especially notable in the central Royal Portal. The statues seem to be squeezed into a tight fit with the adjacent columns, as if the figures were still columns. Yet they are conceived as sculptures in the round rather than in relief and thus reintroduce large-scale sculpture, virtually absent for a millennium. The feverish energy of the Autun tympanum is replaced in the corresponding relief at Chartres with serene calm, showing Christ giving blessing, surrounded by the symmetrically disposed symbols of the four Gospels. The portals of the south transept are later (c.1215) and show the relaxed naturalism of High Gothic sculpture. The jamb figures have a greater suggestion of space around them than their columnar predecessors on the Royal Portal. They are more mobile in space, with axes that hint at a slight S-curve of the body instead of maintaining the strict verticality of the earlier figures. In Italy the Gothic style was never as pervasive as it was in the nations to the north. Manuscript illumination had been the chief outlet for painting in the north (culminating in the Gothic \TInternational Style\t at the beginning of the 15th century), but panel and fresco painting dominated in Italy. The development of painting most clearly traces changes in Italian art, just as developments in architecture and architectural sculpture do in France. The Renaissance After centuries under the dominance of the abstract Byzantine style, Italian (more specifically Sienese and Florentine) painters began to create altarpieces in which the figures became less and less stately and psychologically distant. The backgrounds were done in gold leaf, the rest in tempera, and the frames were elaborate gilded structures patterned on Gothic ornament. Key stylistic features shifted in the time from the late 13th to the early 14th centuries: the illusion of space was strengthened by the use of architectural backgrounds that imply and divide spatial areas. The receding diagonals of the setting unite and extend the space in the painting. \TDuccio\t's Maesta (1308-11; Museo dell' Opera del Duomo, Siena), a polyptych (multipaneled altarpiece) commissioned by the Cathedral of Siena and installed in 1311, shows a point in the transition from the earlier frontal, hieratic style of \TCimabue\t to the later spatial and volumetric style of \TGiotto\t--a change that implies a shift in the conception and portrayal of religious personages from embodiments of abstract spirits to sentient, recognizable human beings. Giotto initiated a great age of fresco painting with his cycles in the Arena Chapel in Padua and the Church of Saint Francis in Assisi, both from the first third of the 14th century. Since the Francis series is based in part on history (Francis had lived just a century before), the iconographic formulae of the past had to be abandoned in favor of new compositions. A century later, the new tangibility of painted figures and settings was taken up by \TMasaccio\t and other Florentines as the \TRenaissance\t gathered momentum. Filippo \TBrunelleschi\t's PAZZI \Tchapel\t (c.1430-33), an elegant addition to the church of Santa Croce (Holy Cross) in Florence, is of simple and sober design, especially when weighed against the dramatic energy and awesome scale of the adjoining Gothic church. The chapel is laid out in multiples of a basic square module. The arches are round and the chapel domed, intentionally recalling Roman architecture. The development of naturalism and individualism in the Renaissance is easily recognized in Florentine sculpture. As early as 1401, Lorenzo \TGhiberti\t adapted antique Roman figural naturalism in his bronze reliefs for the Florence \Tbaptistery\t doors. Large-scale bronze casting came back into practice with \TDonatello\t's equestrian Gattamelata (1445-50) in Padua. The horse and rider, although patterned on the 2d-century bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, is strongly individual. The Renaissance esteem for strength of character and personal presence is quintessentially expressed in Andrea del \TVerrocchio\t's Colleoni Monument (1483-88) in Venice. The robust horse and rider exude the physical firmness that is at once seen as fortitude of will. The strong interests in anatomical correctness of structure and motion and in authority of execution reached their apogee in the work of \TMichelangelo\t in the next century--in sculpture, such as his \TDavid\t (1501-04; Academia, Florence), in painting, such as his ceiling of the \TSistine Chapel\t (1508-1512; Vatican, Rome,) and in architecture, such as the Farnese Palace (1546). Italian painters shared the sculptors' concern for figural naturalism. As interest in the observable world increased, it was accompanied by the perfection of a regular system of spatial structure, or perspective, a primary concern of painters throughout the 15th century. Duccio's compressed and approximate space becomes, through Leon Battista \TAlberti\t's mathematical research and the experiments of such painters as Paolo \TUccello\t and \TPiero della Francesca\t, the orderly and precise space of \TPerugino\t's Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter (1482), a wall fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Toward the end of the 15th century, the increasing availability of important papal commissions in Rome caused the Renaissance center of gravity to shift there from northern Italy. \TRaphael\t and Michelangelo, along with \TLeonardo da Vinci\t, were the outstanding figures of the High Renaissance. More and more, the personality of the artist, his uniqueness, and his artistic sensibility became an important factor to those who sought works of art as well as those who made them. In the artist's workshop (bottega), manned by assistants and apprentices, the distinction between the master's hand and that of his underlings became more noteworthy. Before this, the creation of an artwork had been marked by relative anonymity and cooperation, the work being conceived as the product of group skills rather than the product of individual judgment. The linear quality of Renaissance painting, the clarity by which every detail is perfected to the same degree and discloses itself to the viewer to the same extent, was supplanted in the 16th century by a style featuring \Tchiaroscuro\t--soft, mellow light, deep shadows, and greater awareness of the texture and handling of the paint itself. Color took on new prominence--subtle oil glazes enrich the color and hence the mood; earlier fresco and tempera works sometimes seem chalky, harsh, and arid by comparison. Lighting, once even and unobtrusive, became more selective and emphatic. The Venetian painter \TTitian\t combined intense hues with vivid action in his Bacchus and Ariadne (1522; National Gallery, London). Well illustrated in this canvas is the continuing Renaissance interest in anatomy, while the pagan theme testifies to the new options that competed with Christian subjects. In the essentially Gothic north of Europe, the impact of the Renaissance is best seen in the work of Albrecht \TDurer\t, the preeminent figure outside of Italy. A tradition of superb craftsmanship and dazzling realism had been established a century before by the Flemish artist Jan van \TEyck\t, particularly in the resplendent polyptych Adoration of the Holy Lamb (1432; St. Bavon, Ghent), and even before that with a succession of unsurpassed manuscript illuminators, such as the \TLimbourg brothers\t of the Burgundian court, working up to the second decade of the 15th century. During that century the development and large-scale use of \Twoodcuts and\t \Lengraving\ls also occurred; these printing techniques increased the accessibility of art with their ease in distribution, thanks to their modest cost, small scale, and innate reproducibility. Durer's engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), an allegory with starting imagery, shows the high point of verisimilitude and tonal richness to which Durer elevated the \Tgraphic arts\t. Even more than before, \Tgenre\t, \Tlandscape\t, and \Tstill-life painting\t grew toward independence as categories and emerged, fully individual, in the 17th century. The Baroque Age In the 17th century, the \Tbaroque\t age, the styles of the arts were at their most diverse. Large-scale mural and ceiling paintings with dizzying trompe l'oeil ("eye-fooling") \Tillusionism\t glorified Roman Catholicism in Italy; by contrast, diminutive still lifes recorded the austere tenor of Protestantism in The Netherlands. The Flemish master Peter Paul \TRubens\t, a diplomat as well as an artist, filled acres of canvas with his vigorous, splendidly colored scenes, typified by the 21 huge paintings (1622-25; Louvre, Paris) allegorizing the life of Marie de Medicis. Nicolas \TPoussin\t pursued his own stately classical style that kept Renaissance values alive in Paris and Rome, evidenced by his large Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite (c.1636; Philadelphia Museum of Art). Set against the grand and highly public baroque style are such subtle, intimate, and personally revealing works as \TRembrandt\t's tiny drawing of a child guided in his first steps (1660-62; British Museum, London). Sketches, once regarded as the unimportant preparatory debris of larger finished works, emerged in the 17th century as expressive and uninhibiting outlets for the artist. The personal element is present, too, in such royal commissions as Diego \TVelazquez\t's Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor; 1656, Prado Museum, Madrid), where the artist depicts himself at work in the Spanish king's household. The king and queen, seen reflected in the mirror on the back wall, force an awareness in the viewer of the world beyond the painting as well as the world within it. Baroque architecture retained antique forms but modified their syntax or architectural language, developing new combinations that resulted in strikingly dramatic buildings, often on a large scale, impelled by Michelangelo's and Andrea \TPalladio\t's 16th-century redirection and elaboration of Renaissance classicism. \TSaint Peter's Basilica\t in Rome was so vast a project that several architects were responsible for its progress in the 16th and 17th centuries. Giovanni Lorenzo \TBernini\t finished the work in the mid-17th century by adding the gigantic colonnade embracing the vast piazza, bringing order to the urban environment by sculpturing the space in front of the church. Sculpture, too, took a turn toward the dramatic, as the intense, even theatrical The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1645-52; Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome) well illustrates. In this complex work, Bernini combines the force of the sculpture with that of the architecture around it, even controlling the light, which comes from above as if to make into real light the gilded wood rays Bernini added. Combined with the illusionistic painting above, the whole ensemble exemplifies the baroque desire to maximize illusionistic effects and to integrate the arts. The \Trococo style\t, the joyous child of the baroque, had different tones and emphases in different countries, especially in Germany and Austria, but was initially and most prominently French. In painting, the bombastic heaviness of court styles was softened and lightened in the painterly tradition of Rubens. Pastel pinks, blues, and greens were used to depict such images of pleasure as Antoine \TWatteau\t's Embarkation for the Island of Cythera (1717; Louvre, Paris) and Jean Honore \TFragonard\t's series The Progress of Love (1771-73 Frick Collection, New York). In England, the 18th century was a rich one for a land where the verbal arts had long predominated over the visual. William \THogarth\t invented a new genre with his moralizing paintings organized in series and commenting on contemporary values, such as in the eight paintings depicting The Rake's Progress (1735; Soane Museum, London). Sir Joshua \TReynolds\t, the first president of the Royal Academy (founded in 1768), developed academic painting, drawing on its French incarnation and on Sir Anthony van \TDyck\t's style, both from the previous century. Thomas \TGainsborough\t produced elegant portraits, frequently with a rococo flavor to the handling. His Robert Andrews and Wife (1748-50; The National Gallery, London) combines portraiture with Dutch-inspired landscape painting, showing the gentleman farmer and his wife comfortably at home. Rococo architecture radiates from Paris, where its curvilinear decoration was most fully developed by such artists as Jules \THardouin Mansart\t, Robert de \TCotte\t, and Germain \TBoffrand\t. In southern Germany it was sumptuously expressed in the palaces and churches of Francois \TCuvillies\t and Balthasar \TNeumann\t. Rococo decoration--light in color, exuberant in mood, effortless in structure--was usually divorced from architectural function. The Modern World By the end of the 18th century, there were crosscurrents of different fundamental orientations to the possibilities provided by previous generations. Antonio \TCanova\t's sculpture, Pauline Borghese as Venus (1808; Borghese Gallery, Rome), epitomizes the tranquil repose of the neoclassical outlook. The marble seems to give up its own material nature as stone and assume that of the opulent flesh it represents. Outside Italy, \Tneoclassicism\t gathered even greater strength, as in Jacques Louis \TDavid\t's large neoclassical paintings such as his Oath of the Horatii (1784; Louvre, Paris), in the 1780s and '90s--archaeologically exact in detail (ancient \TPompeii\t was rediscovered in 1748) but contemporary in its implicit political message in revolutionary France. The romantic impulse emerged with those artists usually thought of as intense and often solitary personalities. It appeared at much the same time with William \TBlake\t and Henry \TFuseli\t in England, Caspar David \TFriedrich\t and Philipp Otto \TRunge\t in Germany, and Eugene \TDelacroix\t and Theodore \TGericault\t in France. Thus, the term \Tromanticism\t, as a name for a style, really describes a shared sensibility in the context of different national traditions, whereas the term baroque encompasses many divergent attitudes in one historical style. The Spaniard Francisco de \TGoya\t's Third of May, 1808 (c.1814; Prado Museum, Madrid) embodies key features of the romantic outlook--the paint application reveals the personal, energetic brushstroke of the artist; contrasting masses of light and dark give a spotlit effect to maximize the drama; the action of the scene is at its frantic peak; the subject--the systematic murder of civilians--stirs our sympathy at the same time that it excites our morbid curiosity. The United States had produced artists, such as John Singleton \TCopley\t and Benjamin \TWest\t, who gravitated toward the capitals of Europe, but early in the 19th century an indigenous group of landscapists, named the \THudson River school\t, emerged under the leadership of Thomas \TCole\t. Frederic Edwin \Tchurch\t's Niagara Falls (1857; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.), typical of this school, shows the sublime magnitude and power of nature in an untamed, primeval land. The profusion and diversity of styles in the 19th century is reflected in its architecture. The austerity of neoclassicism followed on the heels of rococo indulgence and spread rapidly from France to England and then to the United States, exemplified by buildings such as Thomas Jefferson's \TMonticello\t in Charlottesville, Va. Revivalism caused a recapitulation of recent, older, and exotic styles, including the \TGothic Revival\t, as seen in Sir Charles \TBarry\t's and Augustus \TPugin\t's Houses of Parliament in London (begun 1836), which found wide favor for the first time since it was eclipsed by the Renaissance. The 19th century was characterized by stylistic upheavals for another reason--the Industrial Revolution and modern technology had begun to change the way structures could be built and hence changed how they looked. Sir Joseph \TPaxton\t's \TCrystal Palace\t (1851; destroyed 1936) utilized the tensile strength of iron to free the walls from the function of support and thus allowed enormous areas of glass (see \Tcast-iron architecture\t). In the modern world, regularity, uniformity, order, and a frequent respect for the structural properties of materials has created economical, functional buildings. This is true of Walter \TGropius\t's \TBauhaus\t buildings at Dessau (1925-26) as well as of Ludwig \TMies van der Rohe\t's Lake Shore Drive apartments (1948-51) in Chicago, which achieve a reposeful monumentality and feature a predominantly glass curtain wall with understated vertical shafts. Academic sculpture, reiterating classical works by rote, was shaken up in the late 19th century by the powerful presence of Auguste \TRodin\t, who invested bronze sculpture in particular with new energy and new freedom in handling. Balzac (1892-97; Museum of Modern Art, New York) is a virtual column of upward force, a singular mass, with facial features deeply cut and intensely expressive. With the 20th century, direct carving of stone regained its popularity, and modeling in clay for bronze casting declined. The new aesthetic brought with it geometric abstraction and resulted in sculpture with the grace and refinement of Constantin \TBrancusi\t's yellow marble Bird in Space (1919; Philadelphia Museum of Art), in which the subject is pared down to its formal essence. The third way of making sculpture--assembling different materials and constructing it--was explored by Aleksandr \TArchipenko\t, Naum \TGabo\t, and many others, who brought new materials into the sculptor's vocabulary--glass, plastic, sheet metal, and the like. The metal constructions of David \TSmith\t followed in that modernist tradition. The late 19th century was also characterized by the rise of the avant-garde in the arts and by the birth of the "isms" that named the principal trends. Claude \TMonet\t's Water Lilies (1899; Louvre, Paris) shows his and the other impressionists' concern with light--the way it can change from hour to hour or day to day, the idea that material things are known to us only by light in its infinite permutations and hence may seem no more substantial than the atmosphere around them. The artists who matured after the first wave of \Timpressionism\t altered its rationale. Georges \TSeurat\t attempted to measure scientifically the effects of light, Paul \TGauguin\t and Vincent \Tvan Gogh\t explored the mysteries of the self, and Paul \TCezanne\t created a painted structure echoing the structure of the visible world. All four are now considered leaders of \TPost\t \Timpressionism\t. In the first decade of this century abstraction, oriented toward problems of composition or pictorial structure, was the preeminent artistic movement, originating, as had most of the important developments of the previous century, in Paris. \Tcubism\t had by far the greatest impact. Pablo \TPicasso\t's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906-07; Museum of Modern Art, New York) creates a new logic of structure for the figures--one that does not depend on their relative appearance from any one point. The rebuilding of the figures also allows new boldness in composition, now that color and shape are freed from functioning purely for description. Also evident is Picasso's interest in \TAfrican art\t, in particular carved masks and wood sculptures, reflected in the grotesque faces of the women. Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930; Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Armand P. Batos, New York) by Piet \TMondrian\t, one of the founders of the neoplastic \Tde Stijl\t group and also working in Paris, gives up representation entirely for an \Tabstract art\t dependent on pure relationships of forms and primary colors. In \TFauvism\t and \Texpressionism\t artists sought to utilize the medium for subjective expression and evidence of personal involvement, while Mondrian and other artists created works that eschewed such features for those of reflective tranquility and formal precision. In a sense, the painting of this century may be understood as progressive self-examination and reduction, in quest of the deepest innate character of the medium. Alternatively, it may be seen as a response to the new, industrial, fast-paced, insecure world, or as the revelation of intuitions no longer suppressed by convention, as in \Tsurrealism\t, in which the inner world becomes the real world. American artists began their own experiments in what came to be called \Tmodern art\t a few years after such work appeared in Europe, sparked by New York's famous \TArmory Show\t of 1913. This culminated with the emergence of New York as the artistic world capital, supplanting Paris, with the development of \Tabstract expressionism\t after World War II. Willem \Tde Kooning\t, Franz \TKline\t, Robert \TMotherwell\t, Jackson \TPollock\t, Mark \TRothko\t, and Clyfford \TStill\t were among the pioneers of this dynamic movement. Today, the distinction between media is being blurred; sculpture seems an outmoded term for assembled pieces, and painting no longer applies if only a document is left, the artwork having become an act rather than an artifact. With such vanguard movements as \Tconceptual art\t and, certainly, \Tearthworks\t, the work transcends gallery walls. These and additional recent trends, including \Tperformance art\t and \Tvideo art\t, not only further the distinction between media but also extend the traditional definitions of art. Roger Baldwin and Mark Roskill Bibliography: Encyclopedia of World Art, 16 vols., McGraw-Hill (1959-83); Fleming, John, et al., The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture, 2d ed. (1972); Gombrich, Ernst, The Story of Art, 14th ed. (1985); Hartt, Frederick, Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, 2d. ed., (1985); Janson, H. W., History of Art, 3d ed. (1986); Kleinbauer, W. Eugene, Modern Perspectives in Western Art History (1971); Kubler, George, The Shape of Time (1962); Murray, Peter and Linda, A Dictionary of Art and Artists, rev. ed. (1984); Myers, Bernard S., ed., McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Art (1969); Nervi, Pier Luigi, gen. ed., History of World Architecture (multivolume series); Pevsner, Nikolaus, An Outline of European Architecture (1963), and, as gen. ed., Pelican History of Art (multivolume series); Roskill, Mark, What Is Art History? (1976); Spencer, Harold, The Image Maker: Man and His Art (1975), and as ed., Readings in Art History, 2 vols., 3d ed. (1982); Steiner, George, Real Presences (1989); World of Art, Oxford (multivolume series). See also: \Tbronzes\t; \Tenamel\t; \Tfurniture\t; \Tglassware, decorative\t; \Tgold\t AND \Tsilver\t \Twork\t; \Thouse\t (in Western architecture); \Tinterior design\t; \Tjewelry\t; \Tmuseums, art\t; \Tsculpture techniques\t.