HISTORY OF PAINTING
Prehistory
The art of our species
If Neanderthal man created any form of art, no traces of it have yet been found. But with the arrival of modern man, or Homo sapiens sapiens, the human genius for image-making becomes abundantly clear. In the recesses of caves, people begin to decorate the rock face with an important theme in their daily lives, the bison and reindeer which are their prey as Ice Age hunters. And sculptors carve portable images of another predominant interest of mankind - the swelling curves of the female form, emphasizing the fertility on which the survival of the tribe depends.
The sculptor of the Willendorf Venus, scraping away with a flint tool at his fragment of limestone, is not engaging in what we would call art. His tiny but profoundly convincing fertility goddess is a religious object. An encampment of mammoth hunters at Gagarino, in the Ukraine, has yielded many such figures. The huts of the Gagarino hunters even have niches in the walls, or little shrines, to accomodate them.
There is no element here of the originality which has often been treasured in more sophisticated societies.
Cave paintings: from 31000 years ago
About 150 painted caves have been discovered in this region. Perhaps the most startling of all are the paintings in Chauvet Cave, found as recently as 1994 and thought to be as much as 31,000 years old. But far better known, as yet, are the glories of Altamira and Lascaux.
The painters do their work by the light of saucer-like stone lamps, burning animal fat. The charcoal wick of one of the lamps at Lascaux has been carbon-dated to about 17,000 years ago. The same process has dated objects found at Altamira to some 13,000 years ago. Around this period cave art in other European sites also reaches its peak.
There is no lack of theories. It has been argued that the magic is to aid the hunters in the chase; or that it is to increase the herds of wild animals; or that these images, in the innermost recesses of a mysterious and holy place, are to help the Shaman into the state of trance which is essential for his priestly work. Speculation may be endless, but the appeal of this early human art is eternal.
As in many early societies, such as Minoan crete, the bull is here a sacred animal. Bulls' heads and horns project aggressively from the walls and altars of the temple chambers of Catal huyuk.
Early civilizations
The Egyptian style: from 3100 BC
By this means, it has to be admitted, the artist is able to tackle each separate feature from the easiest angle. It is a convenient convention, and it is used both in paintings and in low-relief sculptures. Often the two are combined, with paint applied to the lightly sculpted figures.
In the great temple of Ramses II at Thebes, for example, one image shows his queen, Nefertari, being gently taken by the hand by the goddess Isis. The inscription says: 'Words spoken by Isis - Come, great king's wife Nefertari, beloved of Mut, without fault, that I may show thee thy place in the sacred world'. Similarly helpful paintings are later buried with rich Egyptians in the standard form of Papyrus scroll known as the Book of the Dead - introduced in the New Kingdom, from the 16th century BC..
The king holds his defeated enemy by the hair and threatens to strike him. The smaller figure on the left carries the king's sandals. He is smaller not because he is further away, but because he is inferior. Egyptian Perspective is essentially hierarchical.
Minoan art: c.1600 BC
A fresco of about 1600 BC in the royal palace at Knossos, in Crete, develops the island's link with the cult of the bull. Two bullfighters flank the charging creature while an acrobat vaults over it.
One room has on its walls a range of fanciful mountains, of a kind later more familiar in Chinese painting. The Minoan tradition introduces landscape as a subject of art.
Greece
The Greek classical ideal: 5th - 4th century BC
The essential characteristic of classical Greek art is a heroic realism. Painters and sculptors attempt to reveal the human body, in movement or repose, exactly as it appears to the eye. The emphasis will be on people of unusual beauty, or moments of high and noble drama. But the technical ability to capture the familiar appearance of things is an innovation which can later be adapted to any subject.
We can acquire obliquely some idea of what has been lost. One method is through the designs on Greek vases, which survive in great numbers from the classical period. They represent a skilful and cartoon-like style of Greek drawing, and give some idea of the subjects chosen by Greek painters. But in their own time they are considered the work of craftsmen rather than artists.
This large work is presented to the temple of Apollo at Delphi by the ruler of a Greek colony in Sicily, to commemorate victory in the chariot race at the Pythian games in 477 BC.
A boy jockey, of three centuries later, suggests how well the new naturalism of the Greek sculptors will cope with movement. This bronze distillation of human vitality, in the excitement of the race, is one of the most enchanting images to survive from the ancient world.
A splendid example from the 6th century BC is the inebriated pair of dancers from the Tomb of the Lionesses, in Tarquinia.
The Greek style in Pompeii and Egypt
It shows, in dramatic detail, a moment in the battle at Issus between Alexander the great and the Persian king Darius. Even in Mosaic (inevitably more stilted than painting), the image suggests the painter's skill in conveying a realistic impression of a very complex scene.
The dry sand of Egypt has preserved many superb paintings, placed in coffins from the 1st century AD. They are known as Fayyum portraits, from the place where most of them have been discovered. Painted in encaustic, a medium using hot wax, they give an intimate and moving glimpse of some of the men and women of Roman Egypt.
Murals
Roman murals: 1st - 3rd century AD
It is equally conventional to enliven the floor with mosaics. This remains a relatively minor art form until Christian emperors move Mosaic from floors to the walls of churches.
Buddhist murals: 5th - 8th century AD
Two places suggest more vividly than any others the vitality of Buddhist cave painting from about the 5th century AD. One is Ajanta, a site in India long forgotten until Discovered in 1817. The other is Dunhuang, one of the great oasis staging posts on the Silk road.
The paintings range from calm devotional images of the Buddha to lively and crowded scenes, often featuring the seductively full-breasted and narrow-waisted women more familiar in Indian sculpture than in painting. The latest images are from the 8th century, after which the decline of Buddhism in india causes these remote and beautiful places to become gradually abandoned and then entirely forgotten.
Dunhuang, unlike Ajanta, is never lost. But one particular cave is sealed against intruders. Rediscovered in 1899, this cave is found to contain fine examples of Chinese Painting on silk and the world's first known Printed book.
6th - 11th century
Byzantine icons: from the 6th century AD
This form of devotional object is well suited to the needs of monks in remote desert communities. One of the greatest collections of early icons survives in the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, founded in the 6th century by the emperor Justinian.
The tendency to worship these images provokes the violent reaction of Iconoclasm. From726 vast numbers of icons are smashed, along with the Mosaics in churches. But a century later imperial approval is once again given to the production of holy images.
As other regions are converted to the Greek religion, in the Balkans and in Russia, the veneration of images spreads. Indeed to many people nowadays, after a millennium of the rich tradition of Russian orthodox Christianity, the word 'icon' suggests first and foremost a Russian religious painting. And Russian icons, still being painted today, preserve much of the ancient Byzantine style.
Portable paintings
Two separate kinds of portable art evolve, one rather easier to carry about than the other. The heavier kind at first uses wood as the support. Beginning with Byzantine Icons, this tradition develops into the Panel paintings of the early Renaissance and then evolves further when stretched canvas is introduced as the backing for the image (particularly in nothern Italy, in the late 15th century, by artists such as Mantegna).
Then the development of Parchment makes possible the codex (with the leaves bound together at the spine), enabling Christian monks to decorate Illuminated manuscripts. Similarly, Buddhist monks produce the earliest portable paintings from India (of which examples survive from the 11th century AD), each on a single palm leaf.
But it is another Chinese material, Paper, which comes to occupy a place even more central than canvas in the history of art. Paper makes possible the beauties of Persian and indian miniatures. The masterpieces of European Drawing, from the Renaissance onwards, are achieved on Paper - to be followed later by the subtleties of watercolour. And Printmaking, throughout its history, has depended on Paper.
Illuminated manuscripts: 7th - 11th century AD
The glory of these manuscripts (in addition to their wonderfully inventive images of the evangelists) is the intricate decoration, with the famous 'carpet pages' formed of interlacing patterns - reminiscent of the complex linear designs in Celtic metalwork.
Legend adds that after his death Charlemagne is buried in a sitting position, clothed in rich robes and holding a sceptre. On his lap is an illuminated manuscript.
The Carolingian and Ottonian manuscripts are usually gospels or other holy texts, but the secular world intrudes more than previously. A frontispiece often now shows the imperial patron on his throne, in a manner previously reserved for Jesus or one of the evangelists.
This seclusion has preserved them in better condition than other art of the same period, but it has also had the effect of making this a somewhat invisible chapter in the story of European painting. The artists begin to achieve a higher profile, from the 13th century, with Ottonian dynasty.
China
Buddhist banners and scrolls on silk 9th century AD
Chinese poetry painting and calligraphy: Song dynasty
The three skills, all expressed in the beauty of brush strokes, are closely linked. A 'soundless poem' is a conventional Chinese term for a picture. And a typical poem by the Song master Ou-yang Hsiu sounds like a painting.
China's past is also now a theme for conoisseurs, in a fashion pioneered by Ou-yang Hsiu (and echoed centuries later in Italy during the Renaissance). Ou-yang Hsiu clambers 'on precarious cliffs and inaccessible gorges, in wild forests and abandoned tombs' to make rubbings which he publishes, in about 1000 portfolios, as his Collection of Ancient Inscriptions'.
Those who want to get on at court are unlikely to disagree with the emperor on matters of artistic style. Others, opting out of the system, come under the influence of Chan or Zen buddhism with its emphasis on freedom of expression. The Chan painters of the Song dynasty, using a few quick brushstrokes to capture a fleeting visual moment, provide one of the most brilliant interludes in the story of Chinese art.
Medieval Europe
European frescoes: 10th - 13th century AD
The frescoes here, depicting the miracles of Christ, are painted in a strip high above the rows of columns and rounded arches which flank the nave. The rather remote position of the images is exactly that of the Old Testament scenes depicted in Mosaic five centuries earlier in the church of Santa maria maggiore in Rome.
But at exactly the same period elsewhere in central Italy, at Assisi, an important new building is being decorated entirely in fresco. It is the convent church of St Francis. Built on a hillside, and consisting of two basilicas one above the other, its construction begins soon after the saint's death in 1226.
In this design of church the frescoes are close enough to the onlooker for the painter to be able to tell a detailed story.
The scenes of the life of St Francis in the upper church are painted with a much greater sense of realism and drama than has been the case with Byzantine mosaics. Some of these scenes are almost certainly the work, during the 1290s, of the first great genius to use the medium of fresco - Giotto. In the next decade Giotto decorates almost entirely with his own hand an entire chapel in Padua.
The Scrovegni Chapel: AD 1300-1310
The reason is that the frescoes on its walls are the chief masterpiece of Giotto. The artist is already working in a Franciscan church in Padua, probably in about 1305, when Scrovegni employs him for his arena project.
The brilliance of the scheme is that the entire gospel story of the Holy Family, spanning three generations (the Virgin's parents, the Virgin herself and Jesus) is told with great clarity and drama in the panels which run, like a strip cartoon, in three rows along the walls. The Annunciation has the central position at the top of the east wall, but this is also its correct place in the narrative sequence.
The genius of Giotto
But these are painted people, unable to move. In the earlier Byzantine tradition a virtue is made of this limitation. Byzantine figures are richly static, as if selecting and holding a significant expression or gesture. Giotto loses none of the solemnity of Byzantine art, but he adds solidity.
His people are more than real. They have a heroic stillness, a superhuman quality which becomes a characteristic of Italian Renaissance art - seen over the next 250 years in artists such as Masaccio, Piero della francesca and Michelangelo.
Numerous good examples could be found in the Scrovegni Chapel. My own favourite, perhaps, would be the mother of the Virgin gently pushing the young girl up the steps for her presentation in the temple.
He has good reason to wish to be seen in holy company, for his wealth derives from his father's sin of usury. The chapel is an expiation for that sin. Scrovegni would surely be astonished to know how much credit has accrued to his family name over the centuries, thanks to his father's tainted money and his own immaculate taste.
Duccio and the Maestà in Siena: AD 1308-1311
The tradition of the altarpiece, with panels depicting holy figures, goes back many centuries to the lavish blend of gold and jewels and enamelled scenes favoured by Byzantine emperors for the Altars of their churches. In those cases the scenes depicted are simple. But Duccio, like Giotto in Padua, undertakes something much more ambitious - an account, in narrative scenes, of the whole Christian story.
Duccio and his assistants work as fast as the team in Padua in their creation of this marvellous object. The documents reveal that on 9 June 1311 it is carried in a joyous musical procession from Duccio's studio to the cathedral - where it remains on show nowadays in a specially built museum.
With these masterpieces in Padua and Siena, Italian painters bring to a new peak two great traditions of Christian art - the fresco cycle and the altarpiece. The panels in later frescoes become larger, eventually filling the whole wall (as, for example, in Raphael's Stanze in Rome). In altarpieces, by contrast, the narrative subsequently shrinks to a few incidents in the predella, allowing maximum emphasis on the central scene of the Virgin and Child or of the Crucifixion.
Simone's Annunciation in the Uffizi is a good example of this refined style, which by the end of the 14th century is popular throughout Europe - becoming known later as Giotto.
International Gothic: 14th - 15th century AD
This style, flourishing between about 1375 and 1425, is known to art historians as International Gothic - or sometimes simply the International Style. It is characterized by figures of a slender and even winsome elegance, painted with great confidence but looking somewhat ill-equipped for the hurly-burly of everyday life.
The stillness of the scene, and the beauty of the robes and the angels' wings, makes this a glimpse of an ideal world. Its international quality is attested by the inability of the experts to decide whether it was painted in England, France, Italy or Bohemia.
The artists, from the border region between modern Germany and Belgium, provide beautiful images of the duke's many castles and of his peasants working in the fields, as well as scenes from the gospel story.
In the decades after the Très Riches Heures, in Flanders to the north and in Italy to the south, images of a new kind are created. These Flemish and Italian artists are very different from each other, but they share a solidity and a solemnity lacking in International Gothic.
Works on paper
Drawings: 14th - 17th century AD
The Art of china, achieved with a brush on silk or paper, is as close to drawing as to painting. And medieval illuminated manuscripts are often linear in their illustrations. One famous example, the 9th-century Utrecht Psalter, has pen-and-ink drawings of such energetic freedom of line that the closest analogy seems a modern cartoon. But these, in their context, serve the same purpose as paintings. Not until the late 14th century does a drawing come to seem something different, something of its own kind.
With the availability of Paper, drawing becomes another aspect of an artist's skill - and one in which the relationship between hand and eye is unusually direct. A rapid sketch reveals a great artist's genius in an exceptionally fresh manner, which is why drawings are so much prized.
The unusual appearance of many drawings before the 17th century is due to two related factors - the use of a metal point instead of a lead pencil, and the need for a prepared surface on which the metal will make a mark.
A more convenient way of adding extra colour and tone to a drawing is by means of watercolour, in a tradition which begins with Dürer's sketches of landscape and natural history in the late 15th and early 16th century.
Persian miniatures: 14th - 16th century AD
The earliest paintings of this kind date from Persia in the 14th century. The Mongols at this time dominate an entire swathe of Asia from China to the Black Sea. It is probably the influence of Chinese landscape painting (and possibly even the arrival of Chinese artists) which stimulates Persian art to evolve in this new direction.
Towards the end of the 14th century, in 1392, Tabriz is taken by a conqueror as ferocious and alarming as the Mongols - Timur, or Tamerlane. But Timur is not hostile to art (one of his passions is beautifying his capital city of Samarkand), and his descendants - known as the Timurids - prove to be enthusiastic patrons of calligraphy and miniature painting.
The Herat style gradually becomes dull and conventional. But late in the 15th century the academy is shaken into new life by its principal, Kamal-ud-din Bihzad - now considered the greatest artist in the Persian tradition.
Meanwhile pupils of Bihzad carry the tradition into fertile new territories. Two of them are employed in the mid-16th century to teach painting to artists in northern India, a region conquered by descendants of Timur. Here there emerge artists who soon rival the older Persian tradition. These talented upstarts are in the studios of the Timur emperors.
Renaissance in Europe
Art and architecture in Florence: AD 1411-1430
They differ considerably in age. The architect, Brunelleschi, is the oldest. The sculptor, Donatello, is about ten years younger. The painter, Masaccio, is about fifteen years younger again, though he is by a wide margin the first to die.
His aim is to abandon entirely the medieval heritage, even if lack of historical knowledge makes the break less absolute than he intends.
These figures, profoundly significant in the story of sculpture, are commissioned by two of Florence's guilds. The linen drapers and the armourers need statues of their patron saints.
This newly discovered skill is adopted by Masaccio and becomes of absorbing interests to Renaissance artists after Alberti has described the techique in detail in his book of 1436, crediting Brunelleschi as its originator.
Masaccio and the Brancacci Chapel: AD 1423-1428
Masaccio clearly admires the work of Giotto. He adopts the solid manner in which the earlier master depicts character (this can be seen superbly in the figure of St Peter paying the tribute money), and he adds to it two further qualities.
The other significant new element is an increased ability to create figures with a real sense of air around them. The apostles, hearing Jesus tell them that tribute money should be paid to Caesar, make a freely arranged group in an entirely believable open space flanked by receding buildings on one side and a landscape on the other.
Classical perspective: 15th century AD
The perspective in this painting derives from personal knowledge of Brunelleschi and his work. But after Alberti's treatise of 1436 (De Pictura), the new science becomes widely practised. Indeed perspective becomes something of an obsession with Italian painters of the 15th century.
The twin Renaissance interest in perspective and classical architecture can be seen above all in the work of Andrea Mantegna. His Christian scenes take place in totally convincing vistas of Roman buildings, often ruined. And the Dead Christ of about 1485, with the pierced soles of his feet thrust into the face of the onlooker, is the most famous example of foreshortening in the history of art.
Jan van Eyck and the Ghent altarpiece: AD 1432
Nothing is known of Hubert apart from this one mention of his name. But the Ghent altarpiece is only the first of a succession of masterpieces signed by Jan van Eyck during the 1430s. This is the decade in which the Renaissance makes a spectacular appearance in the painting of northern Europe.
Van Eyck, painting with a new certainty of detailed design and execution, makes each panel a powerful work in its own right. And yet each collaborates with its immediate neighbour and its opposite number to make a balanced whole which is even more impressive than the separate parts.
The surrounding panels, tall and thin, are equally impressive. Whether they be the naked Adam and Eve, or organist and singers, or the archangel and the Virgin in the two halves of an Annunciation, these figures occupy their allotted spaces with complete naturalness and realism. Each is a powerful composition in its own right, striking when seen at a distance and fascinating in its detail if viewed more closely.
Jan van Eyck and portraiture: AD 1433-1444
Van Eyck's most famous portrait is of a married couple - an Italian merchant in Bruges, Giovanni Arnolfini, and his wife Giovanna. Painted in 1434 and known now as The Arnolfini Marriage, this view of the pair holding hands in a bedroom is thought to symbolize their union rather than to depict an actual ceremony.
Similarly the character in the faces of the stern Italian merchant and his yielding wife signify that portraiture has come of age. The same is true of a deeply personal image of a man in a turban, painted by van Eyck in 1433 and possibly a self-portrait. But in these pioneering works of portraiture, in the 1430s, van Eyck is not alone - and perhaps cannot even claim priority.
Robert Campin: AD c.1430
These two sitters are simpler than the Arnolfinis (painted four years later). In a head-and-shoulders format, each panel is almost filled by a friendly face in an elaborate headdress of everyday cloth. These people are well-off, but they have few pretensions. They are the first real glimpse of Europe's new middle class. I know of no couple, so far away in time, to whom art brings one so close.
In his mastery of illusionistic technique Campin, like Van eyck, has one technical advantage peculiar at this time to northern Europe - oil paint (see oil and tempera).
Rogier van der Weyden: AD 1435
Van der Weyden retains the clarity and realism of Campin and van Eyck, but replaces the calm and stillness of their work with a new intensity of emotion - seen in the Prado painting in the gruesome dead weight of Christ's body and the collapse into grief of his mother.
For a century after the heyday of van Eyck, Campin and van der Weyden, Italy is the centre of European painting. But the Netherlands and Italy have strong economic links.
The gloriously eccentric canvases of Bosch and brueghel are much appreciated by collectors of the time, particularly within the Habsburg family. But they are a byway of their own, far from the mainstream.
Bruges and Italy: 15th century AD
Hoping for a memorial to himself and his wife, Giovanni could not possibly have made a wiser investment. The Arnolfini Marriage is now one of the most famous paintings in the world. It is also an early glimpse of the Italian interest in Flemish art which will result, later in the century, in the spread southwards of the northern technique of oil painting (see oil and tempera).
The central panel of the triptych shows the Virgin with her newly born Child visited by angels and shepherds, while the kneeling Portinari family are presented from the side panels by saints. This large altarpiece makes the journey south by sea and river. It is the most imposing example of the northern style of painting to have reached Florence, the heart of the southern Renaissance.
Fra Angelico and San Marco: AD 1443-1447
From 1443 Dominicans in Florence employ him to provide contemplative images for the walls of their convent of San Marco. Over the next four years he and his assistants create an extended masterpiece of Italian Renaissance art - though they would not have thought of it in those terms.
The result is a building whose interior, as intended, is marvellously conducive to a sense of wonder and contemplation - certainly for the friars for whom the images were painted, and almost as much among today's tourists.
Jean Fouquet: AD 1445-1460
One of Fouquet's most striking works, from about 1450, is the portrait of his patron, Étienne Chevalier, seen praying with St Stephen and painted as one half of a diptych for a church in Melun. The realism with which the two men are depicted derives from the example of the Netherlands masters of the time, such as Van eyck and van der Weyden, but Fouquet adds a classical calm of his own.
In these small but beautifully controlled compositions Fouquet again brings together two traditions from outside France.
A link with Italy remains a central characteristic in the next great period of French painting, the 17th century.
Piero della Francesca: AD 1445-1460
The painter is Piero della Francesca. He spends much of his working life in Sansepolcro and in Arezzo, far from the main artistic centres, which to some extent explains why his name is largely forgotten for several centuries after his death. Another reason may be the profound calm of his work, unfashionable in periods when art has tended more to the dramatic gesture. He is now recognized as one of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance.
From this beginning, within a few years, Piero evolves his own characteristic and inimitable style. It is visible in the famous Baptism of Christ, probably painted as an altarpiece in Sansepolcro in the early 1450s. The figures stand with monumental stillness, bathed in a cool light of seemingly eternal clarity. This is Renaissance Humanism in its broadest sense, allowing full weight to the dignity of man.
Underpinning the calm certainty of Piero's created world is a fascination with theories of form and Perspective, very characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. Piero is the author of two learned treatises on the mathematics of pictorial illusion.
Botticelli: AD 1470-1510
If Piero's work offers the mystery of stillness, Botticelli introduces mystery of another kind - mysterious content, expressed in a restlessly sinuous line. From about 1470 Botticelli is established as one of the leading painters of Florence, frequently working for the Medici.
His very characteristic style is seen in two of the best loved and most widely recognized paintings of the Renaissance. The Birth of Venus (c.1482) is a traditional subject (in classical mythology the goddess is born from the foam of the sea and floats ashore in a scallop shell). But Botticelli's tall nude and her attendant winds are a strikingly original way of depicting the scene.
These figures depict a scene in Ovid. Zephyr (the west wind) grasps his bride Chloris (the goddess of flowers), whereupon blooms sprout from her lips and she is transformed into the fully developed Flora, strewing spring flowers upon the ground.
Both works are commissioned for his private villa by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, a cousin of Lorenzo the magnificent. They suggest very well the rarefied nature of Renaissance Florence in the late 15th century - an atmosphere about to be brutally interrupted by the more strident certainties of Savonarola.
The High Renaissance
Renaissance man: 15th - 16th century AD
They are Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The older man, Leonardo, is exceptional in that he excels in two entirely different disciplines - experimental science and the visual arts. But on the artistic side alone, Michelangelo must be the man. He creates works, all of the highest quality, in the four distinct fields of sculpture, painting, architecture and poetry.
Leonardo da Vinci: AD 1482-1519
In the tenth and final clause Leonardo adds that he is also a talented architect, sculptor and painter.
Leonardo is ahead of his time in the notions which he dreams up (his flying machines, like the tank, are useless until there is an engine to propel them). But he is also the pioneer of new scientific principles. In his Anatomical researches, as with Vesalius half a century later, observation takes precedence over theory and tradition.
Little remains of his two most ambitious projects, a large mural in Milan and another in Florence. The Last Supper in Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan has been so much restored (because Leonardo used a new but defective technique) that only its linear design is authentic. The scene of the victory at Anghiari for the council chamber in Florence was never completed and was subsequently painted over. Only a few sketches survive, some of them showing skirmishes in the battle.
Sfumato and the Mona Lisa: AD 1505
But no expert guidance is required to appreciate Leonardo's panel paintings. They introduce a subtlety in the use of paint, and in the treatment of light, which adds a new technique to the painter's repertoire. Leonardo gently blurs his colours, one into another, to avoid hard lines. The effect is known as sfumato (smoky) - or in Leonardo's words 'without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke'.
It is probable that the sitter is Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, so the portrait is variously known now as La Gioconda or the Mona Lisa (from monna, an old Italian word for 'lady'). Now in the Louvre, she has been in France since 1517 - when Francis i makes the elderly Leonardo his court painter, and takes Monna Lisa into the royal collection.
Michelangelo the painter: AD 1504-1550
At the end of his life there are frescoes for another Vatican building, the Pauline chapel, which Michelangelo completes in 1550. But all the rest of his painting is done in two creative bursts - on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel (1508-12) and on the wall above the altar (1536-41).
These vast but distant-seeming panels along the centre of the ceiling (each about 10 by 18 feet) tell the story at the start of Genesis - from God's creation of the universe to the famous spark of life (from the Creator's finger to the languid Adam), and on through the expulsion from Eden to the more conventional form of human frailty in the drunkenness of Noah.
The effect of the Sistine ceiling is exuberant, optimistic. It fits with the confident papacy of Julius ii. The end wall of the chapel is very different. But it too reflects its times.
From the Creation to the Last judgement, the Sistine chapel forms a single masterpiece. Giotto's chapel in Padua is the only other building to express so thoroughly one painter's vision.
Raphael: AD 1504-1520
Raphael may be described as the boy wonder of the Italian Renaissance. Born in Urbino in 1483, the son of a minor painter (Giovanni Santi), Raphael makes his way in about 1504 to Florence. Over the next few years he paints the serenely beautiful Madonnas and Holy Families, set in luxuriant landscapes, which first reveal his genius. The style derives from Perugino, in whose studio Raphael probably learnt his craft, but in these paintings there is a new certainty of composition, modelling and colour.
Raphael's astonishing achievement in the Stanze (Italian for 'rooms', and the simple name by which they are still known) is a triumph over many different problems, all new to him when he begins.
Raphael triumphs over these obstacles. In the very first room which he undertakes, the Stanza della Segnatura, he creates with great confidence two crowded and contrasted scenes - the School of Athens, featuring Plato, Aristotle and many others, and the Disputa in which biblical figures and saints discuss the Christian sacrament.
Raphael, by now a master of large narrative compositions, paints the scenes as full-size cartoons in gouache on paper. In spite of hazardous journeys to Brussels and back to Rome, and then to England in 1623 (after being bought for Charles I's tapestry factory in Mortlake), seven of these cartoons survive in surprisingly good condition in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The brilliant portrait of Castiglione, with its muted range of blacks and greys and browns, is the perfect example of this new style. It is a style which will be developed with great flair during the 16th century by the portrait painters of Venice, in particular Titian.
These three artists are already seen as the outstanding figures of the time - a period subsequently regarded as the High Renaissance in Florence and Rome. Five years later, after a brief illness in 1520, Raphael dies. He is thirty-seven. His career has spanned just sixteen years.
Venetian painting: AD 1475-1576
It is also true to say that in architecture, at this same period, the Venetians are enjoying a magnificent late flowering of the earlier Gothic tradition. The mood of the Renaissance has less immediate appeal here. But in terms of painting this changes rapidly after 1475.
After Antonello's visit, the figures in Bellini's paintings evolve towards the rounded and richly human style of the Italian High Renaissance. The grouping of the figures in his altarpieces becomes solidly three-dimensional; his Virgins sit at ease with their infants in enchantingly natural landscapes; his portraits (such as the superb image of Venice's doge in 1501) are of flesh-and-blood people, even if in their Sunday best.
The first of the two is Giorgione. He dies young in 1510 (though only two or three years younger than Raphael), and his work is only known from a very small number of richly glowing masterpieces. The second is Titian, whose life is as long as Giorgione's is short. Titian establishes a dominant position in northern Italian painting equal to that of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael in Florence and Rome.
The first such patron is Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, for whom Titian paints three magnificent classical subjects between 1517 and 1523. One of them, Bacchus and Ariadne, is today one of the treasures of the National Gallery in London.
Charles V and his son, Philip II, become Titian's most persistent patrons. They particularly like his mythological subjects, or poesie. Mythology provides many opportunities to display the naked female form, and these paintings build upon a rich new tradition in western art. Botticelli has pioneered the theme of the nude, but Giorgione and then Titian develop it seductively in the art of Venice. (Cranach is doing so at much the same time, with less subtlety, in Germany.)
A similar freedom of execution is characteristic of Tintoretto, the next of Venice's great masters. Veronese, arriving from Verona in 1555, completes the trio who together give this Venetian school such distinction. Veronese paints his vast canvases in a more measured and controlled style than Titian or Tintoretto. But the richness and colour remain unmistakable, as with so many other painters in the studios of Venice at this time.
Dürer: AD 1494-1528
The young man is Albrecht Dürer, who becomes the outstanding figure in Renaissance Germany. His achievement is enhanced by his originality in many differing fields of art.
Five years later Dürer paints himself in even more splendid clothes, with a view of the Alps through a window. Here, he says, is a man who has travelled - to Italy.
He breaks new ground yet again, travelling to Antwerp in 1520, when he keeps the first example of a journal illustrated with sketches. Meanwhile he makes himself the most prolific Renaissance master in the new Printmaking techniques of woodcut, engraving and etching.
16th century in Europe
Cranach and Holbein: AD 1505-1553
His good fortune, historically, is that from 1517 Wittenberg is at the heart of Germany's religious upheavals. Cranach finds himself, ex officio, the portrait painter of the Reformation. It is from his brush that we know the features of Luther, Melanchthon and other reformers.
A generation younger than Cranach, and altogether more solemn as a painter, is Hans Holbein. If Cranach is the portrait painter of the German Reformation, Holbein fulfils the same role for the leaders of the northern Renaissance.
As a result, in the winter of 1526, Holbein finds himself lodging in the house of Thomas more in Chelsea. He paints here the earliest domestic family portrait in the history of art, showing More and nine of his relations grouped in a room at home (the image survives only in copies and in Holbein's original drawing).
The most familiar image of the self-indulgent tyrant is Holbein's sturdy portrait of him. The future Edward VI is familiar too, as a child, from Holbein's brush. So are three of Henry's queens (Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard) as well as high officials such as Thomas more. Holbein in early Tudor England opens a window on a tense society.
Bosch and Brueghel: AD 1480-1569
In both subject matter (the torments and delights associated with Hell and heaven) and style (the slender figures and clear colours characteristic of International gothic), Bosch's art looks back towards late medieval models.
The two largest and most characteristic paintings are the triptychs of The Haywain and The Garden of Earthly Delights. Now in the Prado, these are among twelve paintings by Bosch acquired by Philip II for the Escorial. All come from the collections of Spaniards posted to the Netherlands. One group of six, including The Haywain, is bought by a diplomat during Bosch's life, presumably from the artist himself.
Brueghel often depicts details as fantastic as those of Bosch (as for example in The Triumph of Death in the Prado), but he usually prefers to find a more realistic context. Thus the weird scenes in the battle between Carnival and Lent (now in Vienna) are presented as part of a village festival.
The Massacre of the Innocents take place with chilling conviction in a snowy northern village. Jesus makes his way, almost unnoticed, through a crowded summer scene to Calvary. In the Fall of Icarus only the leg of the fallen aviator shows above the waves, unnoticed by the ploughman in the foreground. The Tower of Babel is as busy, and as fascinating, as any other large building site. Brueghel is the first great poet of everyday life.
Mannerism: 16th century AD
The word, used in many different ways by art historians, derives from maniera, meaning stylishness. It is used by Vasari, the near-contemporary biographer of the great Renaissance artists, to describe the quality displayed by painters such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.
The first glimpses of this style come in the work of Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, both born in Tuscany in 1494. An early masterpiece in the new style is Pontormo's Deposition (late 1520s) in the Capponi chapel in Florence. The composition is an awkward jumble of figures which miraculously achieves harmony. The colours are a mix of improbable pale blues and purples, both startling and pleasing. The tone of Michelangelo, in the Sistine chapel ceiling, is made in every way more mannered.
Another mannerist master is Bronzino, the adopted son of Pontormo. His special form of mannered elegance is an icy coolness, even in the depiction of naked flesh - as in the famous Allegory with Venus and Cupid in London's National Gallery, where the provocative poses of the figures combine with bewildering ambiguity of meaning to achieve a quintessential icon of mannerism.
But the exquisite and the unusual eventually pall. Religious painting is brought back to reality with a gloriously controversial jolt, in Rome in the early 17th century, by Caravaggio.
El Greco: AD 1570-1614
Arriving in Spain with a Venetian instinct for colour, and with mannerist tendencies picked up during his stay in Rome, El Greco begins to develop his own extraordinarily personal style without further influence from other artists. For nearly forty years Toledo is his home.
Spain in the 17th century will have a powerful tradition of religious art, with painters such as Ribera, Zurbaran and Murillo. But none will match the vibrant eccentricity of El Greco.
17th century in Europe
Caravaggio: AD 1593-1610
The young man soon introduces two invigorating new elements in his paintings: a use of composition and light which gives the viewer an immediate sense of drama; and an intense realism, endowing the characters in a scene with the believable attributes of ordinary people.
This degree of ordinary reality is not to everyone's taste in a religious subject. When Caravaggio delivers a commissioned painting in 1602, showing St Matthew writing his gospel, it is rejected by the outraged priests in charge of the church of San Luigi in Rome.
It is a profoundly touching image, and one which brings a religious moment very close to us. But priests prefer something more respectful. Caravaggio duly obliges with the painting now to be seen in the church. The composition remains intensely dramatic, but the angel is now flying in the air as angels do (even if he does cheekily count off the generations of Christ's ancestors on his fingers).
In the long run the church prefers the drama of Caravaggio's compositions, and his powerful use of light and dark, to the peasant realism of his detail. The preferred style of the 17th century becomes the baroque. This more full-blown exaltation of religious sentiment borrows much from Caravaggio - but not the gritty detail.
Rome and Bologna: AD 1595-1639
This link between Bologna and Rome introduces a creative balance between classical and baroque tendencies in 17th century Italian art.
The most spectacular expression of Roman baroque is the great ceiling painted for the Barberini palace in 1633-9 by Pietro da Cortona. In earlier Roman ceilings, such as Michelangelo's for the Sistine chapel or Carracci's for the Farnese palace, the figures remain obediently within their allotted architectural compartments. In the Barberini ceiling they are less restrained.
But this is a private palace. In public this ecstatic Roman style is more appropriately put to the service of the Catholic Reformation - and nowhere more so than in the sculptures of Bernini.
Moghul miniatures: 16th - 17th century AD
From this blend of traditions there emerges the very distinctive Moghul school of painting. Full-bodied and realistic compared to the more fanciful and decorative Persian school, it develops in the workshops which Akbar establishes in the 1570s at Fatehpur sikri.
Detailed scenes are what Akbar likes, showing court celebrations, gardens being laid out, cheetahs released for the hunt, forts being stormed and endless battles. The resulting images are a treasure trove of historical detail. But as paintings they are slightly busy.
The artists rise superbly to this challenge. In Jahangir's reign, and that of his son Shah jahan, the Moghul imperial studio produces work of exceptional beauty. In Shah jahan's time even the crowded narrative scenes, so popular with Akbar, are peopled by finely observed and convincing characters.
Velazquez: AD 1617-1660
In his early years, working from about 1617 in his home town of Seville, he is influenced by the dramatic chiarascuro and realism of Caravaggio. And he proves that he can match anyone for realistic detail in his paintings of street vendors, such as the woman with her dish of fried eggs (now in the National Gallery of Scotland) or the water seller in Apsley House in London.
So for nearly four decades the painter works, with complete security, in a context where his talents are enormously appreciated. He has a studio within the palace. The king frequently drops in ('nearly every day', according to Velazquez's father-in-law) to sit for a while and watch the genius at work.
The result is a body of work which can be seen as a one-man climax to the Italian High Renaissance. With a fluency of brushwork to match Titian's, and a magic touch which can make a few flecks of paint look like detailed lace or the rich texture of fur, Velazquez records the king and his family posing in their best clothes in the studio, prancing on a favourite horse, or out in the landscape shooting - and inevitably, with the passage of time, growing older.
Some artists might feel stifled by this environment, but clearly Velazquez finds it stimulating. He records it with affection in his masterpiece Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour), painted in 1656 and now in the Prado. It is an intimate glimpse of the private side of the Spanish court.
Here, in an inspired ensemble, is the world of Velazquez.
Rubens: AD 1600-1640
Leaving his home in Antwerp in 1600, at the age of twenty-three, Rubens finds employment at the court of Mantua and travels on to Rome towards the end of 1601. He begins an assiduous study of antique sculpture and of the masters of the Italian High renaissance. His own talent is soon so evident that in 1606 he is given a most prestigious commission. In preference to all the artists of Rome, Rubens is invited to paint an altarpiece for Santa Maria in Vallicella, recently built for the Oratorians.
This luxuriant ease of composition and of colour becomes Rubens' hallmark, whether he is dealing with biblical themes or classical mythology (Greek goddesses, in his hands, become the most comfortable of nudes).
Prominent among his patrons are some of the leading rulers of Europe, often known personally to Rubens from the diplomatic missions entrusted to him by the regents of the Spanish netherlands.
Three years later Rubens goes on a diplomatic mission to Madrid, where he becomes friends with Velazquez - and so impresses Philip IV that as many as 100 paintings from Rubens' studio subsequently enter the Spanish royal collection. In 1629, after helping to negotiate a peace between Spain and England, Rubens travels to London.
By that time another painter from the Spanish netherlands has made a stir in London - providing the superb portraits by which Charles and his queen, Henrietta Maria, are familiar to the world. Also from Antwerp, and also knighted by Charles i, he is Anthony van Dyck.
Van Dyck: AD 1618-1641
It is this same elegance, in a slightly gentler vein and with a lighter palette, which later makes van Dyck the favourite portrait painter in English court circles. He moves to London in 1632 and is immediately encouraged by Charles I, a most enthusiastic and knowledgeable collector of paintings. Within weeks of Van Dyck's arrival the king and queen are sitting for him. That same summer he is knighted.
Other members of the aristocracy are as eager to use his services. They glow in his canvases, handsome and arrogant Cavaliers in fine fabrics (John and Bernard Stuart in London's National Gallery are a perfect example). Nemesis awaits them when Civil war breaks out in 1642. But the painter who gives them immortality has died in the previous year.
Most notable of all among Dobson's works is the strongly characterized portrait of the Cavalier collector and connoisseur of art, Endymion Porter (now in Tate Britain).
French classicism: 17th century AD
The oldest of the three is Georges de la Tour, who uses as his main stylistic device the strong contrast between light and shade pioneered by Caravaggio. He takes this to far greater lengths than his predecessor, often limiting the source of light in his paintings to a single candle. The result is a startlingly beautiful severity, with simple outlines of light picking out the contours of flesh or fabric. Where the Italians transform the example of Caravaggio into Baroque, a French artist takes it towards classicism.
Nicolas Poussin moves to Italy in his twenties, in 1624. He makes an intense study of classical sculpture and finds himself increasingly out of sympathy with the Baroque style prevailing in Rome. His response is to devise his own alternative. Where Baroque painters engage in flamboyant visual gestures, carried along on a flood of emotion, Poussin develops a rational pictorial grammar to express the inner meaning of a scene and the attitudes of the participants.
His own paintings divide viewers more decisively than those of any other great master. Enthusiasts rate them among the highest achievements of European painting. Others see only stilted exercises, revealing the effect of the wax figures which Poussin poses and groups on a miniature stage to help in perfecting his compositions.
Claude invents his own very original form of landscape painting. His countryside is beautifully calm and composed (no wind shakes a leaf in a Claude painting). Classical buildings frame striking vistas. Small figures, often mythological, move discreetly among them.
Claude's seductive images appeal greatly to English aristocrats on the Baroque (there are more of his paintings in Britain than in any other country). English Grand tour of the 18th century is much influenced by these idealized French views of a classical Italian scene.
The great Dutch century: 17th century AD
Holland and its neighbouring provinces have a new prosperity in the 17th century, and the Dutch burghers are determined to enjoy in pictorial form the fascinating world in which they live. For the first time there is a thriving middle-class market for art. The painters respond eagerly to the available opportunities, producing a flood of work across a very wide range.
John Evelyn, visiting the Rotterdam fair in 1641, is astonished at the trade in paintings.
Jacob van Ruisdael, a few years younger, is the greatest of the Dutch landscape painters. He works a more dramatic vein than Cuyp, finding romance in wooded landscapes among which streams tumble or half-hidden roads wind their way. Ruisdael's theme is followed by his pupil Hobbema - though Hobbema's most famous image, The Avenue at Middelharnis, is untypical in its boldly formal design.
Rembrandt, a generation younger, is an artist of such broad and diverse talents that he needs a section to himself.
Pieter de Hooch opens the window most fully on to the austerely comfortable houses in which Dutch merchants and their families now live. With him one catches glimpses from one room to the next, down passages, through the hall, along the garden path. The viewer, in the world of de Hooch, seems to know his way around.
Gerrit Dou, a pupil of Rembrandt, also paints people in tight corners. He does so with an exquisite precision of detail which has caused his followers to be known as the fijnschilders (fine painters). Even Vermeer paints in corners. But his brilliance is more than in the detail.
Rembrandt: AD 1625-1669
Others have done this, but few so extensively. We have almost 100 self-portraits of Rembrandt, at all stages of his life.
This is a field in which Rembrandt in his maturity will produce powerfully dramatic masterpieces, such as the Blinding of Samson in Frankfurt or Belshazzar's Feast in the National Gallery in London. Both feature Rembandt's wife Saskia in the only female role (as also does The Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum). Once again we are close to the artist's own world.
The painting makes Rembrandt's reputation in Amsterdam, and ensures his a steady stream of commissions for portraits during the 1630s. At the end of the decade the Amsterdam militia, headed by Captain Frans Banning Cocq, select him for the large group portrait which is by now an essential attribute of any such company of guards.
Saskia, painted so often and so dramatically by her husband and now seen incongruously amid the military turmoil of The Night Watch, dies at the age of thirty in the very year of the painting's completion, 1642. Three years later another companion, Hendrijke Stoffels, enters Rembrandt's life and becomes in her turn his favourite model. She and his son Titus together manage his affairs for a while from 1656, to help him through the financial crisis of his later years.
His etchings survive in numerous states, revealing the process of their creation, and they are treasured in their own time as much as today. The title of Rembrandt's best-known print reflects the value put on them. His etching of Christ surrounded by the sick, done in about 1649, acquires its popular name half a century later because of the extraordinary price paid for one impression - the Hundred Guilder Print.
Vermeer: AD 1653-1675
At his death in 1675 Jan Vermeer is an unknown artist outside his home town of Delft. He becomes a member of the painters' guild in Delft in 1653 but apparently sells very little of his own work during his lifetime, living instead as a dealer. At his death he is bankrupt; his wife gives two of his canvases to settle a bill with the baker. For the next two centuries Vermeer's paintings, if appreciated at all, are usually attributed to others. In the early 1880s his exquisite Girl with a pearl earring goes for the equivalent of five shillings in an auction in the Hague.
A measure of the esteem which these works acquire during the early years of the 20th century is that Vermeer, of all other Dutch artists, is the one whom van Meegeren chooses to forge when he hopes to sell expensive fakes to the Germans during World War II. But the forger could hardly have chosen a master more impossible to imitate.
In Vermeer women read letters, play harpsichords, pluck lutes or sip wine in quiet corners of everyday rooms just as they do in so many other Dutch paintings of the period. But an extra dimension is miraculously added in the way he captures the effects of light, filtering through latticed windows, casting gentle shadows on walls or floor, bringing up warm bright patches in fabrics and gently rounding out the flesh of face or hands.
Art is being created before our eyes. Yet in a more real sense it already exists, also before our eyes, in the enticing tones of Vermeer's finished painting. We can dwell at our ease within one beautifully achieved trick of reality, while observing the creation of another.
18th century in Europe
French delicacies: AD 1713-1789
In these same years a young artist, Antoine Watteau, is producing paintings which suggest a new social mood.
The painterly skill with which Watteau captures such fragile moments is seen at its best in his last work, the large Enseigne de Gersaint. Painted as a shop sign for his friend Gersaint (in just eight mornings in 1721, when Watteau is mortally ill), it shows elegant Parisians inspecting the dealer's paintings and mirrors.
Two younger artists reflect and satisfy this mood. François Boucher is born in 1703, Jean-Honoré Fragonard is a generation younger. Both produce the romantic landscapes and the titillating boudoir scenes which suit the market of the day. Boucher is at the erotic end of the spectrum in his portrayal of the young Louise O'Murphy sprawling naked on a sofa. Fragonard provides the sentimental touch in an image such as Le Souvenir, showing a slender girl in exquisite silks who carves an initial on the trunk of a tree, closely observed by her spaniel.
Chardin's subjects are unfashionable - most often just domestic servants going quietly about their business, among gleaming copper utensils. But his treatment of them has a profound honesty. And the paint sings. Chardin is one of those rare geniuses where the art is itself both the mystery and the joy.
Venetian sunset: 18th century AD
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is born in Venice in 1696. The major influence on his life is Veronese, whose example he follows in tackling detailed and complex historical scenes. In keeping with the rococo spirit of the age, and with fresco as his preferred medium, Tiepolo brings to these pictorial pageants a light palette and a visible deftness of touch - and in doing so provides some of the most exhilarating images in the whole of 18th-century art.
The building, designed by Balthasar Neumann and completed in 1744, is on the cusp between Baroque and rococo. The great staircase and the central hall present Tiepolo with difficult and challenging surfaces which he fills, between 1751 and 1753, with superb scenes. They celebrate, with a very Venetian flourish, the glories of Germany's imperial past.
Canaletto is born in Venice in 1697. In 1720 he begins to specialize in views of the city, and two years later wins his first commission from an English visitor. Thereafter the English become his chief patrons, partly thanks to the encouragement of Joseph Smith (the British consul in Venice and a keen collector of Canaletto).
In Venice, from about 1760, the demand of the tourists for views is met at a simpler and cheaper level by Francesco Guardi. His small canvases, more vague and informal than Canaletto's topographical studies, are notable for the ease and delicacy with which Venice's watery landscape is suggested.
Hogarth and the English scene: AD 1728-1764
His first great success is a picture in 1728 of the stage of the Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre during a performance of John Gay's Beggar's Opera, the smash hit of the day (over the next three years he paints several versions of the same picture). In 1731 Hogarth completes the six paintings which make up A Harlot's Progress, the first of his very successful narrative sequences in which a contemporary moral tale is told as if in a series of satirical scenes on a stage.
From the 1730s Hogarth also paints portraits. They tend to have a delightfully rough informality (such as the infants of the Grey family in 1740, cheerfully tormenting a puppy) or a sturdy masculinity (Captain Coram of the same year). But by this time a painter of more elegant portraits, Allan Ramsay, has set up shop in London.
British portraits: AD 1739-1830
By the 1750s Ramsay has a younger rival, of considerable skill and soaring ambition, with whom he finds it hard to compete. Joshua Reynolds, who establishes himself in London in 1753 after two years in Italy, has a high notion of the dignity of art and the artist. He is the natural first president of the Royal Academy, when it is founded in 1768, and he endows his sitters with an equivalent sense of importance.
If anything is missing in these powerful images by Reynolds, it is perhaps the fleeting quality of fashion - a quality abundantly supplied by his slightly younger rival Thomas Gainsborough. When Gainsborough catches William and Elizabeth Hallett on their Morning Walk (in London's National Gallery), the couple may not have the air of lasting importance which Reynolds would give them; but on this particular morning there is no one to match them.
Stubbs's wonderfully calm and elegant images of sleek horses with their grooms, huntsmen or jockeys in neatly tailored landscapes, or of conversation pieces with the family sitting proud and upright in their carriages, are in their own way as significant a part of the portraiture of prosperous 18th-century England as the work of Reynolds and Gainsborough.
Thomas Lawrence, the youngest of this group, is also the most flamboyant and free in the brilliant facility of his brush strokes. As Holbein immortalizes Henry VIII, so Lawrence does the same for the Prince regent, or George IV. He and his most famous subject die in the same year, 1830.
Neoclassicism: 18th - 19th century AD
During the 18th century a quest for classical authenticity is undertaken with new academic vigour. There are several reasons. Archaeological sites such as Pompeii are being excavated. And interest is shifting from the Roman part of the classical heritage to the Greek.
The avant-garde greets this notion with enthusiasm. Over the next century Greek themes increasingly pervade the decorative arts. Greek porticos and colonnades grace public buildings. Greek refinement becomes the ideal for neoclassical sculptors and painters.
In architecture there has already been a strong classical revival early in the century, particularly in the Palladian movement in Britain. Robert Adam, returning from Rome in 1757 with a multitude of classical themes and motifs in his head, creates an eclectic style very much his own - in which classical severity and rococo fancy are subtly blended to satisfy his customers.By the turn of the century these pleasant fancies seem too frivolous. A more rigorously Greek style becomes the architectural fashion in many parts of Europe.
In 1802 Canova is invited by Napoleon to visit Paris, beginning an extraordinary relationship with the Bonaparte dynasty.
Many of these neoclassical artists treat their ancient themes with a wispy sentimentality, more in keeping with their own time than with Greece or Rome. This is true of the French artist who pioneers the style in the 1750s, Joseph-Marie Vien. The charge can also be laid against the most energetic neoclassical painter working in Britain, Benjamin West. But an entirely new rigour is introduced by Vien's best pupil, Jacques-Louis David.
The Bonaparte link results also in one of the most famous of all neoclassical statues. Canova sculpts the emperor's sister, Pauline Borghese, reclining naked to the waist on a chaise longue. Just as her brother is Mars, she is posing as Venus - holding in delicate fingers the apple which she has been awarded for her beauty in the judgement of Paris.
So the 19th century acquires, through neoclassicism and the Greek Revival, a conventional style of considerable vigour. Architects of important new buildings, whether churches, parliaments or banks, will now consider a sprinkling of Greek columns as one serious option. The other, resulting from another 18th-century revival, is to go Gothic.
The other most successful member of the school is a Dane, Bertel Thorvaldsen, who arrives in Rome in 1797 and is given encouragement by Canova. Twenty years later Thorvaldsen is employing some forty assistants in his Roman workshop. Even before the end of his life a museum devoted to his works is established in Copenhagen.
British watercolours: 18th - 19th century AD
Watercolour is the natural medium for sketches of this kind. The passion for the picturesque therefore lies behind the development of the most distinctively British strand in art history - that of the landscape watercolour.
This development coincides with a fortunate new discovery in printmaking, that of the Aquatint - which for the first time can provide in printed form something very close to the tones of a wash drawing. Again Paul Sandby is a pioneer. His Welsh trips result in the publication, in 1776-7, of thirty-six Views in Aquatinta taken on the Spot in Wales.
From the start very individual styles emerge among these artists. Many attempt a neat topographical precision, particularly in subjects such as ruins. Others go for much bolder effects. John Robert Cozens, touring in Switzerland and Italy in 1776, brings back wonderfully misty and evocative images. Francis Towne, in the same regions in 1781, turns landscape into simple blocks of wash so bold that the effect is almost abstract.
One figure above all personifies the development of the watercolour in England. Turner in his twenties paints brilliantly in the detailed topographical style. Later in his life he produces bright shimmering washes as bold as his large canvases of the same period. Constable says that they seem to be painted 'with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy'.