Read the following outline of the history of Western painting. Find out about the dominant artistic schools and prominent artists

Painting was one of the earliest ways in which man sought to express his own personality and his understanding of an existence beyond the material world. And painting, like other arts, exhibits universal qualities that make it easy for viewers of all nations and civilizations to understand and appreciate.

Western painting is in general distinguished by its concentration on the representation of the human figure, whether in the heroic context of antiquity or the religious context of the early Christian and medieval world.

The Renaissance extended this tradition through a close examination of the natural world and an investigation of balance, harmony, and perspective in the visible world, linking painting to the developing sciences of anatomy and optics. The first real break from figurative painting came with the growth of landscape painting in the 17th and 18th centuries. The landscape and figurative traditions developed together in the 19th century in an atmosphere that was increasingly concerned with the interaction of light and colour and the expressive qualities of paint handling. In the 20th century these interests contributed to the development of a third major tradition in Western painting, abstract painting, which sought to uncover and express the true nature of paint and painting through action and form.

The richness, the variety, and even the inherent contradictions of 15th-century Florentine painting are vividly expressed in the art and the person of Leonardo da Vinci. Although he devoted a great deal of his career to a theoretical study of the art of painting, he was above all interested in the appearance of things and in the way they operated. This curiosity led him to a study of the flight of birds, the movement of water, the features of the land, mechanical processes, the growth of plants, the anatomy of man, and many other things. All the knowledge that he gained was directed toward enriching his art, for Leonardo thought of himself primarily as a painter.

The unfinished "Adoration of the Magi" is at once a summary of 15th-century Florentine painting and a forecast of the High Renaissance style.In his painting Leonardo creates a composition that is at once ordered and free, calm and full of movement, simple and varied. Pose, gesture, and glance in the attendant figures create a movement leading toward the figure of the Madonna and Christ Child. The figures are placed in a free yet ordered space that gives a sense of grandeur and expansion.

"The Virgin of the Rocks" (Louvre), painted in Milan about 1483, stands at the threshold of the High Renaissance. In this painting Leonardo introduced the pyramidal composition that was to become a hallmark of the High Renaissance. The placement of the Madonna, the Christ Child, the young St. John the Baptist, and the angel creates a movement that the eye willingly follows, yet the movement is contained within the implied pyramid, giving a sense of stability and calm grandeur to the composition. The mysterious landscape that surrounds them implies adequate space in which the figures can exist and move and an extension into depth that the eye cannot follow. The light that falls on the figures delicately models them in a subtle juxtaposition of light and shade. The contours of the figures seem to dissolve into the background. The subtle and delicate modeling and the suggestive smoky atmosphere were much imitated, but what was more important and eventually more influential was Leonardo's use of light and shade as a unifying compositional factor. This was unprecedented in painting. Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" revolutionized portrait painting.

His "The Last Supper" marks the actual beginning of the High Renaissance in Italy. The painting stands as one of man's greatest achievements. All elements of the painting lead the eye to the calm and pyramidal figure of Christ. The room is depicted according to the rules of perspective, with all the direction implied by the lines of the architecture meeting at the vanishing point in the head of Christ. In this painting Leonardo has combined the sense of drama of the groups of disturbed apostles, the sculptural figure of Christ, and the rationally constructed space of the first half of the 15th century with the movement and emotion of the second half, achieving a new synthesis that goes far beyond anything his predecessors had dreamed was possible.

The style called High Renaissance or classic is, in a sense, the culmination of the experiments of the 15th century, for it is above all characterized by a desire to achieve harmony and balance. Movement is important and necessary, yet the eye is always given a point of focus and rest. The composition is self-contained and conforms to Alberti's definition of beauty as "that harmony of parts to which nothing can be added or taken away without destroying the whole." Although there is movement implied in the poses of the figures and movement across the surface of the composition, it is always dignified movement, giving the impression of calm. The style exhibits variety and richness, yet maintains simplicity and unity. It is frequently compared to Greek art of the 5th century BC for its calm and monumentality. Its greatest practitioners were the Florentines Leonardo da Vinci (although Leonardo's earlier work is usually assigned to the early Renaissance), Michelangelo, Raphael, and the Venetian Titian. Other artists, such as Andrea del Sarto and Fra Bartolomeo in Florence, Correggio in Parma, and Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione in Venice, were more or less attracted to the style at some point in their careers.

The painter who benefited most from the example of Leonardo was undoubtedly Raphael. He was already a successful and respected artist when, at the age of 21, he came to Florence only to discover that all he had learned and practiced was old-fashioned and provincial. He immediately started learning from the Florentines. His drawing style changed from the tight contours and interior hatching he had learned from Perugino toward the freer, more flowing style of Leonardo. From Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks" he evolved a new Madonna type seated in a soft and gentle landscape.

The Stanza della Segnatura (the first of a series of rooms in the Vatican constituting Pope Julius II's apartments), particularly the "School of Athens," which Raphael painted between 1508 and 1511, is one of the clearest and finest examples of the High Renaissance style. In the "School of Athens" Raphael, like Leonardo before him, made a balance between the movement of the figures and the ordered and stable space. He peopled this space with figures in a rich variety of poses yet controlled poses and gestures to make one group lead to the next in an interweaving and interlocking pattern, bringing the eye to the central figures of Plato and Aristotle. The unity, variety, and harmony of High Renaissance combine in the frescoes that decorate the Stanza della Segnatura.

At about the same time Raphael was working in the papal apartments in the Vatican, Michelangelo had undertaken the formidable task of decorating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12), also for Pope Julius II. The balance between the kinetic energy of God the Creator with his whirlwind of figures around him and the lifeless form of Adam comes to a focus in the two hands and the significant void between them. In the final three scenes of creation, Michelangelo moves beyond his contemporaries to a highly personal statement without parallel in the art of the 16th century. The Sistine ceiling was recognized as a masterpiece in its own time. The artist was judged to be a superhuman being and earned the title "the divine Michelangelo." Contemporaries spoke of the terribilita, or awesome power, of the frescoes and their creator.

Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael raised the artist and his art to a position of esteem perhaps never enjoyed (or deserved) either before or since.

The outstanding representative of Venetian school, Titian was great in all aspects of the painter's art. In his portraits he searched and penetrated human character and recorded it in canvases of pictorial brilliance. His religious compositions cover the full range of emotion from the charm of his youthful Madonnas to the tragic depths of the late "Crucifixion" and the "Entombment." In his mythological pictures he captured the gaiety and freedom of the pagan world of antiquity, and in his paintings of the nude Venus ("Venus and Adonis") and the Danae ("Danae with Nursemaid") he set a standard for physical beauty and eroticism that has never been surpassed. Other great masters--Rubens and Nicolas Poussin, for example--paid him the compliment of imitation.

From the van Eycks through Bruegel to Rubens, the Flemish painters were masters of the oil medium and used it primarily to portray a robust and realistically detailed vision of the world around them.

In Pieter Bruegel 's powerful portrayals of peasant life one finds best reflected the brutality of the age. Bruegel, influenced by Bosch, developed a robust style marked by structural solidity, rhythmic sweep, and an ironic moralizing eye for the grotesque.

The great master of the Flemish Baroque was Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens showed an unrivaled mastery of the oil medium, creating for the monarchs of France and Spain fluid, luminous works of great energy and power. His early works, such as "The Elevation of the Cross" (1610; Antwerp Cathedral), show evidence of careful study of the Italian masters, but these works also have a rippling, silky surface and an animal vitality wholly Flemish in character. Rubens' mature allegorical style, illustrated by his cycle of paintings memorializing the career of Marie de Medicis, queen of France (1622-25; Louvre, Paris), was ideally suited to the tastes of the Baroque age. In these exuberant works, fleshy classical deities watch over many events of Marie's life. Rubens' studio became a training ground for many Flemish painters, among them Anthony van Dyck, a child prodigy who later became famous as a court portrait painter in England.

For most modern observers Rembrandt 's art has got a kind of universal familiarity and popularity. Yet the biblical scenes and the self-portraits that today form the hallmark of his art were by no means typical of Dutch pictures of the 17th century. More commonly, his contemporaries produced landscapes, still lifes, or genre scenes of daily life that never held great interest for Rembrandt. In his own era Rembrandt achieved greatest fame as the most fashionable portrait painter of Amsterdam during the 1630s. Another major field of Rembrandt's accomplishment was his etching. His technical mastery had a lasting effect on printmakers for centuries.In his youth Rembrandt's ambition was to rival the dominant artists of Europe, particularly Peter Paul Rubens. The silent human figure is the central subject of Rembrandt's art and contributes to the sense of a shared dialogue between viewer and picture, which still is the foundation of Rembrandt's greatness as well as of his popularity today.

The17th century English painting was dominated by a series of foreign-born artists, mostly portraitists (e.g., Rubens and Van Dyck) Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller continued this trend after the Restoration. Lely's portraits of the members of the court of Charles II set the pattern for English portraiture of the second half of the 17th century. The vast majority of the painting executed by native artists remained thoroughly provincial.

William Hogarth was heavily influenced by the continental Rococo style. Early in his career he succeeded in breaking away from the mainstream in portraiture, and his moralizing paintings are superb illustrations of life in the England of George I and George II.

He invented a new form of narrative painting that imparts a moral.

Scottish-born Allan Ramsay was one of the most successful portrait painters in London in the 18^th century; and to him must be given the credit for the initial marriage of the Italian "grand style" to English portraiture.

Joshua Reynolds possessed a more profound acquaintance with the old masters than any of his contemporaries. His colouring and handling can be compared with Rembrandt, Rubens, and Veronese, and his poses are indebted to the sculpture of antiquity and to Michelangelo.

Thomas Gainsborough was in every way the antithesis to Reynolds. Trained entirely in England, he had no wish to visit Italy. Instead of the "grand style," his tastes in portraiture lay in the delicate flickering brushwork and Rococo traditions. He preferred landscape painting to portraiture and his paintings display superb harmony of models and landscape.

Throughout the 18th century, portraiture remained the most important genre of British painting. Sporting and animal painting, however, took on an entirely new dimension in the work of George Stubbs.

The term modern art has come to denote revolutionary developments in Western painting and the other visual arts since the second half of the 19th century. It includes a wide variety of movements, styles, theories, and attitudes, the modernity of which lies in a common tendency to break with past conventions and precedents in subject matter, mode of depiction, and painting technique.

By the mid-19th century, painting was no longer basically in service to either the church or the court but rather was patronized by the upper and middle classes of an increasingly materialistic Western society. Painters were thus confronted with the need to better reflect the changed conditions of modern life. Another important stimulus to change was the development from the early 19th century on of photography. Painting no longer had to serve as the means of recording information. It was freed to explore aesthetically the basic visual elements of line, colour, tone, and composition.

The beginnings of modern painting cannot be clearly demarcated, but it is generally agreed that it started in mid-19th-century France. The paintings of Gustav Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists represent a deepening rejection of the academic traditions of Neoclassicism and Romanticism and a quest for a more truthful naturalistic representation of the visual world. Postimpressionist successors of these painters--notably Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and Paul Gauguin--can be viewed as more clearly modern in their refusal from traditional subject matter and techniques and in their more subjective and personal vision.

From about the 1890s a succession of varied styles and movements arose that are the core of modern painting. These modern movements include Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism, Metaphysical painting, Surrealism, Social Realism, Pop Art and some others.

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