For Native American art in North America, see North American Native art.

The Cultures of Central America

The Maya occupied the general area of Yucatán and adjacent parts of Central America from very early times. Their roots were in the Archaic period (c.2000 B.C.), but it was only during the Late Preclassic (300 B.C.-A.D. 150) and the Protoclassic (A.D. 150-300) periods that the traits associated with the Classic Maya were developed. Their greatest artistic achievements included their elaborate calendar, writing, palaces and temple pyramids with vaulted rooms made of limestone, polychrome pottery, stone stelae, and stylized wall paintings and bas-reliefs.

The Classic Maya (A.D. 300-900) was the apex of Maya civilization and is described as that period when the Maya inscribed the "Long Count Calendar" on their monuments. The remains of Bonampak, with its famous murals, can be dated to shortly after 800. Maya cities were ceremonial centers, and some of the edifices may be more properly identified as sculptured monuments. Maya architectural styles are found in three main regions: the Petén district (Uaxactún and Tikal); the cities of the river valleys, such as Piedras Negras and Palenque; and the cities of central and N Yucatán (Uxmal).

In the valley of the Motagua River to the south are Copán and Quiriguá, where sculpture flourished in the form of huge, elaborately carved stone stelae; more delicate forms and a refined spatial sense are evident in the famous stucco sculpture of Palenque and in the airiness and grace of its buildings. In the flat, dry country of N Yucatán, Maya architecture underwent changes in style. The erection of stone stelae was largely abandoned, and decoration, notably at Uxmal, became geometric. The cause of the collapse of the Maya civilization is not precisely understood. The culture persisted over so long a period that it is easier to understand the rest of Mesoamerican art and culture from the framework of Maya chronology.

The Olmec civilization, to the west, in the area of Veracruz and Tabasco, Mexico, was developing in the Preclassic period. Specifically, the period 800 to 400 B.C. marks the finest period of Olmec art as typified by the finds made at the site of La Venta. It is believed that the Olmec devised the Long Count Calendar and invented writing and that they may well be the source of these developments among the Maya. Noted for the excellence of their stone carving—ranging from small, finely detailed jade objects to colossal, often realistic basalt heads—the Olmec frequently used a motif combining human and jaguar features.

Teotihuacán is much to the west of the Olmec and Maya areas and dates from the 1st cent. A.D. to A.D. 700. The major part of the site and the height of its artistic expression belong to the periods Teotihuacán II and Teotihuacán III (c.300-700). Teotihuacán is an urban center, perhaps the greatest in Mexico; its monumental pyramids, temples, and royal processional roads are an extraordinary architectural achievement.

In the latter part of Maya Early Classic (c.A.D. 400-c.A.D. 600) there is evidence of great influence from Teotihuacán, as exemplified at the site of Kaminaljuyú and in varying degrees at other sites, including Tikal and Uaxactún. Erected on high land above the surrounding swamps, the latter two sites reveal their massive, richly decorated temples in the midst of tropical jungles. The site of Teotihuacán apparently was deliberately destroyed by invaders c.700 and thereafter ceased to be a factor in Maya civilization.

After the fall of Teotihuacán, a period of nearly two centuries (700-900) seems to have ensued during which there was no single dominant force, but a number of warring factions. One of these, the Toltec, made their capital at Tula (c.900-1200), northwest of Teotihuacán. The Toltec achieved power and dominated much of N and central Mexico until they were vanquished in 1156 or 1168. They invaded Maya country, principally Chichén Itzá (c.987). There they had a profound influence as revealed by the pyramids at Tula and Chichén Itzá, with their deep colonnades (an unusual feature in Mesoamerican architecture) and their decorative bas-relief and sculptured structural elements, e.g., the 15-ft-tall (4.5 m) caryatids at Tula. Toltec occupation has also been identified at other sites in the Yucatán. Indications are that Chichén Itzá was abandoned by the Toltec around 1224.

The final great native conquest in Mesoamerica was by the Aztec, who rose to power following a period of anarchy after the destruction of the Toltec's Tula. By 1344 the Aztecs had founded their magnificent capital, Tenochtitlán, at the site of present-day Mexico City in the Valley of Mexico, which became one of the architectural wonders of ancient America. Aztec art was eclectic, drawing on the traditions of conquered areas; but under the influence of the harsh Aztec religion, it developed a unique character. The importance of human sacrifice in the cult of the war god, Huitzilopochtli, permeated life and art, and representations of skulls, hearts, hands, and sacrificial scenes were common.

Much of the stone sculpture was huge and elaborate, a remarkable example being the statue of the earth goddess Coatlicue. Masses of intertwined serpents dominate the statue, which bears a necklace of human hearts and hands. Less ominous subjects, such as the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl, and various animals, were often beautifully carved in a smooth, compact style. Featherwork, jade carving, goldwork, extraordinary ceremonial vases, and superb textiles were produced by the artisans of subjugated groups, especially the Mixtec. Aztec power over Central Mexico extended until the arrival of Cortés in 1519.

The area of the Mixtec and Zapotec in Oaxaca, Mexico, was not completely conquered by the Aztecs. The Zapotec originally occupied the site of Monte Albán from late Olmec times (c.600 B.C.) until about A.D. 900. Then a new seat of Zapotec civilization was founded at Mitla. Later the Mixtec began to infiltrate, intermarry with, occupy, and absorb the Zapotec. Apart from architecture, the Mixtec also excelled at the minor arts: goldwork, jewelry, vessels fashioned with semiprecious stones, turquoise and feather mosaics, extremely fine polychrome pottery, and painted books known as codices.

Many of the Mexican cultures produced ceramic figurines and pottery, often of superior artistic merit. The site of Tlatilco, in the Valley of Mexico, has yielded famous ceramics of remarkably early date, about 500 B.C. Delicacy of detail characterizes the figurines of Teotihuacán, and the finely decorated funerary urns of Monte Albán (c.400 B.C.) are particularly well wrought. In the western states of Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima, early cultures produced an enormously varied array of fanciful and often grotesque terra-cotta figurines and pottery during the Classic period, A.D. 300 to 900. The Tarascan of Lake Pátzcuaro were one of these groups; they still produce excellent lacquerware. In the jungle states of Veracruz, Campeche, and Tabasco many sites, particularly Remojadas, have yielded fine examples of clay sculpture.

The Cultures of South America

The first great art style of the geographical area that is now Peru was that of the civilization that flourished at Chavín de Huántar in the northern highlands c.900 to 200 B.C. A more or less contemporaneous culture of the north coast produced a style of pottery known as Cupisnique. The Paracas culture of the south coast, of the same era, left some of the most beautiful textiles of pre-Inca Peru as well as fine pottery decorated with resin paint. Excellent painted ceramics and beautiful weavings were also characteristic of the Nazca civilization (c.200 B.C.-A.D. 600) to the south, which also produced the huge and mysterious "Nazca lines."

The Nazca's contemporaries on the north coast, the Mochica, surpassed them in the art of painted pottery. Battle scenes, rituals, animals, and mythological beings were masterfully depicted. Their ceramic "portrait vessels" in the form of human heads are the high point of realism in pre-Columbian art. They were also master builders, the Mochica Pyramid of the Sun being the largest in South America. During the following period (c.600-800), the Tiahuanaco culture gained ascendancy. With the decline of Tiahuanaco the kingdom of the Chimu flourished. Their capital, Chan Chan, has long been considered one of the great centers of ancient Peru.

Chan Chan was surpassed only by the colossal achievements of the Inca, who conquered the Chimu in the latter part of the 15th cent. As engineers the Inca were unsurpassed in ancient America. Their agricultural terraces are still in use, and the extensive network of roads and bridges that spanned their empire would merit the envy of modern road builders. However, their cities and fortresses remain their towering achievement. The great cities of Cuzco and Machu Picchu and the imposing fortresses of Sacsahuamán and Ollantaytambo are typical examples of their skill. The Inca also excelled at stone carving and metalwork, achieving in this latter art a degree of perfection comparable to that reached anywhere in the world. Their civilization fell to the Spanish invaders in 1538.

Primarily an avant-garde form, performance art is often emotional and topical, frequently dealing with political and personal matters and with issues such as race, class, and feminism. Probably the best-known contemporary American performance artist is Laurie Anderson; others include Nam June Paik (earlier also involved with happenings), Michael Smith, Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneeman, and Martha Wilson. Often classified as performance artists are such monologist-writers Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, Karen Finley, Anna Deavere Smith, and John Leguizamo.

The United States

The foremost repositories of art in the U.S. include, in New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the richest and most comprehensive American collection of world art (much of the museum's superb medieval collection is housed separately in the Cloisters); the Museum of Modern Art; the Frick Collection, the dwelling and outstanding acquisitions of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the American Folk Art Museum; the Guggenheim Museum, exhibiting primarily the works of contemporary European and American artists; the Pierpont Morgan Library, housing a vast number of important illuminated manuscripts; the Hispanic Society Gallery; the New-York Historical Society, noted for its 19th-century American paintings and Audubon collection; the Brooklyn Museum, strong in Egyptian and American art; and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

In Boston the Museum of Fine Arts houses a major collection of American paintings, including the largest number of works by Copley and Stuart in the nation and a magnificent collection of East Asian art; and the Gardner Museum (see under Gardner, Isabella Stewart) holds a remarkable private collection in an unusual setting. In Cambridge, Mass., the Fogg Museum of Art of Harvard owns a great number of American works and has fine Italian art and graphic arts collections.

In Washington, D.C. the Smithsonian Institution operates several major art galleries: the Freer Gallery of Art, notable for its many works by Whistler and its East Asian art collection; the National Museum of American Art and the adjoining National Portrait Gallery; The National Museum of African Art; the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a collection of Asian art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, devoted to modern art; and the Renwick Gallery of American design. The National Gallery of Art, an affiliated institution, houses Washington's principal collection of European and American art in two buildings. Other major collections in Washington include the Corcoran Gallery of Art (see under Corcoran, William Wilson) and the Phillips Collection, both of which are strong in American works.

Other collections of note in the eastern United States include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, N.Y.); the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum; the Wadsworth Athenaeum (Hartford, Conn.); the Yale Univ. Art Gallery (New Haven, Conn.) and its collection of British art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, noted for its many works by Eakins (both: Philadelphia); the Barnes Collection (Merion, Pa.), a superb private gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist works; the Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh); and the Walters Art Gallery (Baltimore).

In the Midwest and South the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the museums and galleries of Detroit, Columbus (Ohio), Toledo, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Kansas City (Mo.), and New Orleans are outstanding. The major collections in the West include the Gilcrease Institute (Tulsa, Okla.), the Dallas Museum of Art, the Kimbell Museum (Fort Worth, Tex.), the Huntington Library and Art Gallery (San Marino, Calif.), the Los Angeles County Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art (both: Los Angeles), the Getty Center (Brentwood, Calif.), and the San Francisco Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Canada and Mexico

The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) holds that country's foremost public art collection. In Mexico City the major collections are the Palace of Fine Art and the National Museum of Anthropology, which houses a vast treasure of Mexican art and important archaeological discoveries as well as a superb ethnographic collection.

Great Britain and Ireland

The richest British collections are housed in the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Wallace Collection (see under Wallace, Sir Richard), and Sir John Soane's Museum (all: London); the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford); the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge); the National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh); and the Glasgow Art Galleries and Museum (Glasgow). The Royal Collection at Windsor Castle is especially noted for its old master drawings. In Ireland the most important collections include the National Gallery of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland, and the Trinity College Library (all: Dublin).

Continental Europe

The major European museums and galleries include: Austria—Academy of Fine Arts, Art Historical Museum, Liechtenstein Gallery, Albertina, National Library, and the Czernin Collection (all: Vienna); Belgium—the Royal Museum of Fine Arts and the Old Museum (both: Brussels), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Antwerp); France—the Louvre, the Musée D'Orsay, the Pompidou Center, the Bibliothèque nationale, and Cluny, Picasso, Rodin, Carnavalet, Petit-Palais, and Guimet museums (all: Paris), the Versailles Museum and the local institutions of Nantes, Chantilly, Marseilles, and other cities.

A great number of German museums were destroyed during World War II. Most of the outstanding collections in Berlin, Munich, and Dresden were saved, and among the smaller surviving collections are those in the galleries of Augsburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt-am-Main, Freiburg, Hanover, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, and Trier. Among other museums in Europe are: Greece—the Acropolis Museum, the Byzantine Museum, and the National Archaeological Museum (all: Athens); Italy—Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, The Academy art museum, and the Bargello (all: Florence), the Vatican, Lateran, Barberini, Farnese, and Borghese palaces (all: Rome), the Academy of Fine Arts and the Scuola de San Rocco (both: Venice), the Brera Palace (Milan), the Cathedral Museum (Siena), and the National Museum (Naples).

Other European museums include: Netherlands—Rijks Museum (Amsterdam), the Mauritshuis (The Hague), and the Groninger Museum of Art (Groningen); Portugal—National Museum (Lisbon); Scandinavia—Royal Academy of Arts and National Museum (both: Copenhagen) and the National Museum and State Historical Museum (both: Stockholm); Spain—the Prado, the Armería, the Escorial (all: Madrid) and the El Greco Museum (Toledo); Switzerland—Swiss National Museum (Zürich) and the Art Museum (Basel). In Istanbul, Turkey, the art of Babylon, Assyria, and Byzantium may be seen in the archaeological museums. Among the great Russian collections are those housed in the Hermitage (St. Petersburg) and the Tretyakov Gallery and Museum of Western Art (both: Moscow).

Middle East and Asia

In Egypt the Cairo Museum excels in the ancient art of that country. The Tehran Museum and the Government Collections in Tehran hold many of the most important Persian art treasures. The Calcutta Museum exhibits the art of India. In Japan in the National Museum (Tokyo), the Kyoto Museum, and the collections of Shoso-in and the National Museum (both: Nara), all periods of Japanese art are well represented.

See also photography, still.

Origins of Modern Art

In the second half of the 19th cent. painters began to revolt against the classic codes of composition, careful execution, harmonious coloring, and heroic subject matter. Patronage by the church and state sharply declined at the same time that artists' views became more independent and subjective. Such artists as Courbet, Corot and others of the Barbizon School, Manet, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec chose to paint scenes of ordinary daily and nocturnal life that often offended the sense of decorum of their contemporaries.

Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, the great masters of impressionism, painted café and city life, as well as landscapes, working most often directly from nature and using new modes of representation. While art had always been to a certain extent abstract in that formal considerations had frequently been of primary importance, painters, beginning with the impressionists in the 1870s, took new delight in freedom of brushwork. They made random spots of color and encrusted the canvas with strokes that did not always correspond to the object that they were depicting but that formed coherent internal relationships. Thus began a definite separation of the image and the subject. The impressionists exploited the range of the color spectrum, directly applying strokes of pure pigment to the canvas rather than mixing colors on the palette. In sculpture, dynamic forms and variations of impressionism were created by Rodin, Renoir, Degas, and the Italian Medardo Rosso.

In the 1880s, Seurat and Signac developed the more detailed and systematic approach of neoimpressionism, while Van Gogh and Gauguin, using bold masses, gave to color an unprecedented excitement and emotional intensity (see postimpressionism). At the same time, Cézanne painted subtler nuances of tone and sought to achieve greater structural clarity. Flouting the laws of perspective, he extracted geometrical forms from nature and created radically new spatial patterns in his landscapes and still lifes. Other important innovations of the late 19th cent. can be seen in the starkly expressionistic paintings of the Norwegian Edvard Munch and the vivid fantasies of the Belgian James Ensor. In the 1890s the Nabis developed pictorial ideas from Gauguin, while sinuous linear decorations were produced throughout Europe by the designers of art nouveau.

The Isms of Early Twentieth-Century Art

From the early 20th cent. color reigned supreme and invaded the contours of recognizable objects with the brilliant patterns of fauvism (1905-8), dominated by Matisse and Rouault in France, the orphism of Robert Delaunay and Frank Kupka, and the explosive hues of the German group Die Brücke, which included such practitioners of expressionism as Kirchner and Nolde. Kandinsky transformed (c.1910) color into a completely abstract art absolutely divorced from subject matter. The fauvists and expressionists shared an appreciation of the pure and simplified shapes of various examples of primitive art, an enthusiasm that was generated by Gauguin and extended to Picasso, Brancusi, Modigliani, Derain, and others.

Cubism

About 1909 the implications of Cézanne's highly organized yet revolutionary spatial structures were expanded by Picasso and Braque, who invented an abstract art of still lifes converted into shifting volumes and planes. Cubism, developed by the artists of the school of Paris, went through several stages and had an enormous influence on European and American painting and sculpture. In sculpture its notable exponents included Picasso, Duchamp-Villon, Lipchitz, González, and Archipenko, who began to realize the possibilities of convex and concave volumes. Cubism was absorbed in Italy by the exponents of futurism (c.1909-c.1915) and in Germany by the Blaue Reiter group (1911-14); both these movements were cut short by the advent of World War I. Fauvism and cubism were introduced by members of the Eight to a generally shocked American audience in the Armory Show of 1913, and from then on Americans began to participate significantly in the development of modern art (see American art).

Geometric Abstraction

At roughly the same time as cubism was developing, Russia made extraordinary contributions to the current of nonfigurative art. The sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner joined the movement known as constructivism (c.1913-c.1921), and the painter Casimir Malevich founded suprematism (1913). In Holland members of the Stijl group (1917-31), including Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, created a disciplined, nonobjective art. These Russian and Dutch developments in the second decade of the 20th cent. were applicable to many varieties of art and industrial design, and their principles converged in the teachings of the Bauhaus in the 1920s. Kandinsky, the highly imaginative Paul Klee, and the American Lyonel Feininger were among the celebrated exponents of the Bauhaus.

Other Modes of Modern Art

A more fanciful sort of modern art was created by Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Kurt Schwitters in the irreverent manifestations of the Dada movement. Dada artists devised "ready-mades" and collage objects from diverse bits of material. The movement was linked with Freudianism in the 1920s, producing the wild imagery of surrealism and verism, as seen in the paintings of Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró. The 1920s also saw the beginning of an art of social protest by exponents of new objectivity, among them George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann. With the rise of fascism and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the protest increased in intensity. The Mexicans Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros painted murals in which the human figure was made monumental and heroic (see Mexican art and architecture).

Postwar Modern Art and the Rejection of Modernism

The development of a new American art movement was held in abeyance until after World War II, when the United States took the lead in the formation of a vigorous new art known as abstract expressionism with the impetus of such artists as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. Action painting, as the movement was also known, made its impact felt throughout the world in the 1950s. A number of notable developments were led by artists associated with these and other New York school artists. As the influence of abstract expressionism waned in the 1960s, artists came to question the very philosophy underlying modernism. A vast variety of new movements and styles came to dominate the art world that, in the aggregate, can now be seen to mark the beginnings of artistic postmodernism and the post-midcentury shift from modern to contemporary art.

Modern Sculpture

In sculpture the explorations of Julio González led to abstract configurations of welded metal that can be seen in the works of Americans such as David Smith, Theodore Roszack, Seymour Lipton, and Herbert Ferber. This tradition has been a lasting one, and contemporary examples of large abstract compositions of welded metal can be found in the work of many later sculptors, including Mark di Suvero and Beverly Pepper.

Alexander Calder largely stood apart from other modernist sculptors with his brightly colored mobiles and stabiles, which have since been widely influential, as in the large, brightly colored sculpture of Albert Paley. Meanwhile, the early-20th-century tradition of Brancusi's organic abstract forms was inventively exploited in midcentury by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth in England and by Jean Arp in France, while the Swiss Alberto Giacometti and the Italians Giacomo Manzù and Marino Marini each achieved a distinctive sculptural style. Later 20th-century sculpture has followed the patterns of the various postmodern art movements and is described in the article on contemporary art.

Presented on video screens, digital works may be created of abstract or figurative forms in the artists' choice of millions of shades of color, and may be manipulated so that the images appear, combine, morph, and/or disappear. Digital art also includes works, many of them interactive, made to be viewed on the World Wide Web. Sculpture, too, can be a digital art as a result of rapid prototyping, a technique that "prints out" three-dimensional forms from computer-designed models. Contemporary digital works range from the shimmering and transforming video paintings of Jeremy Blake to the computer-modified imagery of Carl Fudge's screenprints, the shifting geometric panels of John F. Simon, Jr., and the participatory audiovisual worlds of Janet Cardiff. Among the many other artists involved in the movement, each with his or her own approach to the seemingly infinite possibilities of digital art, are Jim Campbell, Leah Gilliam, Robert Lazzarini, Jim O'Rourke, Paul Pfeiffer, Marina Rosenfeld, Elliott Sharp, Diana Thater, Inez van Lamsweerde, and Adrianne Wortzel.

Taken together, these many approaches to art represented a wholesale rejection of the tenets of modernism—e.g., its optical formalism, high seriousness, utopianism, social detachment, invocation of the subconscious, and elitism—and marked the beginning of a new era in art. In their many manifestations, these movements and those styles that followed have come to be grouped under the umbrella term of postmodernism. For the most part, this art is one of pluralism and eclecticism. In fact, the very lack of a uniform organizing principle or ideology is one of the most important hallmarks of postmodern art. Nonetheless, within the enormous diversity certain tendencies, trends, and movements can be discerned.

One of the products of the almost universal dismissal of modernism by contemporary artists has been the development of a new historicism, ironic and detached, which has spawned a number of artistic "neoisms." These include the neoexpressionism of such German artists as Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, of Italians including Francisco Clemente and Sandro Chia, and of the American Julian Schnabel. Among other contemporary "neo" styles are the cool "neo-geo" abstractions of Peter Halley and others, the stark structures of neoconceptualism, the slick neopop of such artists as Jeff Koons, and the landscape revival represented by Diane Burko and April Gornik, among others.

Many new artists have simultaneously invoked and challenged art history, rejecting the heroic stature of the singular work of art and the single (usually white male) artist and invoking the ubiquity of mechanically produced reproductions by employing sophisticated "quotations" or "appropriations" from prior works. This can be found, for example, in Cindy Sherman's photographic recreations of paintings, in the multiple quotations of historic images of David Salle's paintings, in the postmodern takes on Barnett Newman by Philip Taaffe and on Manet by Yasumasa Morimura, and in the nearly identical representations of famous images such as Picasso's icon of modernism Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Mike Bidlo.

Also widespread among contemporary artists has been a repudiation of the idea that underlies most works of pure abstraction—that the work of art is a self-sufficient entity. Rejecting the exclusively self-referential images of abstraction and the constricted commercialism of the art world (yet often embracing the wider commercialism of a consumer society), the new art has sometimes manifested a marked if somewhat detached social consciousness, often expressed in issue-driven minority, gay (frequently AIDS-related), and feminist imagery. By and large, the inroads achieved by feminism in the 1970s have been reflected in later decades not so much by the insistently female, body-derived 1970s imagery of Judy Chicago or Miriam Schapiro as by the full participation in the once mainly male-dominated art world of such varied artists as Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jennifer Bartlett, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Bloom, Katharina Fritsch, and others.

Arising from the multimedia experiments of the 1970s, the widespread use of a variety of technology-based media has persisted into the art of the new century. Often included are elements of film, video, sound, performance (see performance art), and architecture (principally in installation art). Another trend that has widened the definition and scope of contemporary art has been the conceptually driven use of both photography and language as the substance of numerous works of art—in Kiefer's photographic collages, in Kruger's words and photographic images, in Bruce Nauman's neon phrases, in Lawrence Weiner's painted words, in Holzer's billboarded, carved, electronically reproduced, or otherwise created linguistic neotruisms, and in many other artists' works. Another contemporary art movement, digital art, was pioneered in the 1970s but did not become prevalent until the beginning of the 21st cent. Digital artists make use of sophisticated computers, software, and video equipment to create an extremely varied body of works.

Postmodern art has also blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture (and sometimes architecture), with artists often including in their works a host of wildly nontraditional materials. Since the 1960s shaped paintings and painted sculpture have become commonplace, while the materials of art have ranged from Rauschenberg's stuffed goat to Joseph Beuys' globs of fat to the smeared body fluids of various contemporary artists. Moreover, a wide variety of spaces and places, both private and public, have become arenas for the frequently ephemeral work of many contemporary artists.

Later 20th-cent. and early 21st-cent. sculpture has assumed a central position in contemporary art and has followed the patterns of the various postmodern art movements, for example, the three-dimensional pop icons of Claes Oldenburg, Koons's purposely banal, often erotic figures, and the minimalist constructions of such artists as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris. Other important trends in contemporary sculpture include an increasing use of mixed media and the creation of works that draw their meaning and impact from their architectural context and also emphasize the role of the spectator. This is as significant in the room-centered examples of installation art as it is in such large public works as Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Background

Works of art are subject to a variety of disfiguring ills, many of them caused by environmental effects, particularly temperature and humidity changes and pollution. Much modern conservation effort is directed toward producing a stable, favorable situation for the display of art works and maintaining regular inspection and diagnostic procedures to combat deterioration. Techniques for this inspection have become increasingly sophisticated; they currently involve photographic, X-ray, infrared, and other radiation examination, as well as complex chemical analysis.

All effective art conservation and restoration ultimately depend upon the restorer's understanding of materials, technical craftsmanship, and aesthetic and historical awareness. The support (such as wood panel, canvas, paper), the ground (gesso, chalk), and the surface treatment (wax, varnish) of a painting all undergo some form of decay over the years.

Support Restoration

Frescoed walls absorb moisture from the atmosphere. The moisture carries to the wall soluble surface salts that effloresce and injure the fresco pigments. To halt such injury water-permeable fixatives may be applied to help stabilize the pigment and prevent it from flaking off. A more drastic treatment is transfer, by which the mural and upper layer of plaster are cut away from the wall altogether and made fast to a new support. A major instance of successful transfer was carried out on many frescoes unearthed at Pompeii.

Wood-panel paintings undergo much swelling and shrinking with humidity variations. Wood-boring insects and the dry rot of fungus also attack them. The painting may be transferred to a new support, or the old one may be strengthened by impregnation with a consolidating medium (including several plastics) or given auxiliary support. Insecticides and fungicides may suffice to combat woodworms and dry rot; in cases of advanced destruction, reinforcement by impregnation may be necessary.

Canvas supports also absorb and lose moisture, swelling and shrinking, and thereby losing much pigment. In addition, canvases may be weakened or torn with comparative ease. A method of relining (restretching on a second undercanvas) may be effected whereby the old canvas is attached to the new by means of an adhesive. This may be a thermoplastic wax-resin combination or a water-base glue. The painted surface becomes impregnated with the adhesive and is consequently stabilized.

Irregular staining, called foxing, is the bane of print and drawing collectors. In humid conditions foxing attacks the adhesives and mounts of paper-based art, including watercolors, by producing the nutrients favored by molds present in the atmosphere. The work may sometimes be sterilized and remounted on a support chosen for its mold-repellent quality. It may be further treated with a fungicide. Some foxing stains may be removed by careful bleaching and washing, but this is a difficult technique requiring considerable knowledge of materials.

Ground Restoration

Repainting and retouching are means by which a damaged work may be restored, but both largely depend for success upon the personal judgment and aesthetic capability of the restorer. Repairs may be necessary where the results of overzealous cleanings of the past have produced injury or revealed a pentimento that disrupts the composition. Much of the restorative work of the 19th cent. had a tendency to "improve" the work of art with arbitrary additions and distortions, and a good deal of 20th-century attention was given to removing these additions.

Surface Restoration

The restorer's greatest problems concern the surface coating of the painting. A decayed or badly discolored varnish may be removed painstakingly by mechanical means or regelled with the judicious use of solvent, often applied as a delicate spray. In other cases the old varnish may be powdered by rubbing and removed by hand or, more commonly, chemically dissolved. Such techniques are beset by dangers inherent in the variable nature of the original pigments and varnish, and the risk of injury increases with the age of the painting. When a new varnish is applied, the contemporary restorer uses a much more easily removed surface protector than was common in the past.

Restoration of Sculpture

Sculpture, especially that which stands outdoors, is particularly vulnerable to environmental changes. Placing the sculpture in a temperature- and humidity-controlled situation is the best means by which to preserve it. Stone sculpture requires periodic washing; either steam, spray, or trickled water is used, depending on the porosity of the stone. Soap, but not detergent, may also be applied. Broken sculptures may be mended with clear, cold-setting adhesives, sometimes mixed with a suitably colored filler, or by means of dowelling. Large pieces of sculpture are held together with metal dowels, usually of copper, stainless steel, or brass.

Broken wood sculpture is also dowelled, as is ivory, and special cements may also be used to fill cracks. Wood sculpture is also vulnerable to woodworm and dry rot and may be treated with insecticide and fungicide. Badly decayed wood works may sometimes be preserved by means of impregnation with a plastic medium.

Metal sculpture may be waxed to protect it from atmospheric corrosives. Bronze acquires a patina, or irregular surface pattern caused by deposits of sulfides and oxides, that is widely considered aesthetically pleasing, whereas patina on lead objects results in eventual decay. Cracks in metal sculpture may be filled with special adhesives. Corrosion may be halted by electrolytic reduction, which, however, destroys patina. Various chemical solvents and mechanical techniques are used to remove specific incrustations.

Restoration Emergencies

The flood in Florence, Italy, in Nov., 1966, was among the greatest disasters in modern history in terms of the destruction of works of art. Conservators and restorers from all over the world applied emergency treatment to the treasures of painting, sculpture, and architecture that could be saved. Among those were five panels from the bronze doors of the Baptistery by Ghiberti, which had been ripped apart and ruined by the furious, oily waters. In replacing them experts made use of an exact replica of the doors in San Francisco. In 1972, Michelangelo's Pietá in St. Peter's, Rome, was attacked and mutilated by a madman with a hammer. The most delicate restoration work was required to make unobtrusive repairs on this masterpiece of sculpture. A number of well-known paintings also have been damaged by attackers in recent years, and these, too, have been restored as unobtrusively as possible. In a more recent emergency, a 1997 earthquake centered in the Italian town of Assisi damaged many works of art, most notably its 13th-cent. basilica. An international team worked on restoring its architectural and sculptural elements as well as its fragile frescoes. In late 1999 the newly earthquake-proofed and nearly completely restored basilica was reopened to the public; Giotto frescoes on two ceiling vaults still await restoration.

See also Hittite art and architecture; Phoenician art.

Sumerian Art

The art of the Sumerian civilization, as revealed by excavations at Ur, Babylon, Uruk (Erech), Mari, Kish, and Lagash, among other cities, was one of enormous power and originality that influenced all of the major cultures of ancient western Asia. Their techniques and motifs were made widely available by means of cuneiform writing, which they invented before 3000 B.C. Poor in the raw materials of art, the Sumerians traded crops from their fertile soil for the metal, stone, and wood that they required. Clay was their most abundant native material, and its qualities determined their style of baked-mud building and the nature of their fine-textured pottery.

Sumerian craftsmanship was of marked excellence from very early times. A vase in alabaster from Erech (c.3500 B.C.; Iraq Mus., Baghdad) shows a detailed ceremonial procession of men and animals to the fertility goddess Inanna, carved in four bands on an elegant vase shape. A major peak of artistic achievement is represented by a female head, called Lady of Warka (Erech) from about 3200 B.C. (Iraq Mus.). It is carved in white marble with simplicity and subtlety.

The vast royal cemetery at Ur has yielded many masterpieces of Sumerian work. Outstanding among these are a wooden harp detailed with gold and mosaic inlay picturing mythological scenes on the soundbox, surmounted by a black-bearded golden head of a bull (c.2650 B.C.; Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia); a gaming board of wood inlaid with bone, lapis lazuli, shell, and stone, mounted in bitumen (c.2700 B.C.; British Mus.); a ritual offering stand in the shape of a ram, made of silver, lapis lazuli, and mussel shells, rearing on his hind legs to eat from a tree of gold; and a splendid gold helmet fashioned from a single sheet of metal and beaten into the form of a head of wavy hair with a chignon at the back (c.2500 B.C.; Baghdad).

At Lagash a strongly modeled head of stone (c.2500 B.C.) portrays a Sumerian man, clearly representing the structural type of these ancient people. Its large and widely spaced features set on a heavy round skull are revealed in bas-relief and inlay work of the period. Examples of the famous votive stone sculptures of Sumer discovered at Tell Asmar represent tall, long-haired, bearded figures with huge, staring eyes and long, pleated skirts, standing rigidly with hands folded above the waist. Some are portrayed kneeling.

The ziggurat temple form was the most striking architectural achievement of the Sumerians. One ziggurat at Erech extended over an area of half a million square feet (46,500 sq m). It was set upon a mound, and the platform built to support its crowning shrine was 40 feet (12 m) high.

Among other Sumerian arts, one of the most sophisticated was the cylinder seal, a small carved cylinder of stone or metal that, when rolled over seals of moist clay, would leave the reverse image of its carving in relief as an identifying mark or signature. Used to mark documents and property, the cylinders were worn on a wristband or necklace during their owners' lifetime and were buried with them. A great many examples survive, bearing primarily scenes of religious ritual, often portraying the legendary hero Gilgamesh.

With the ascent to power of Sargon of Akkad, Sumerian art reached new heights of expression, particularly in sculpture. The greatest known examples reflecting that splendor include a bronze head thought to be a portrait of Sargon himself (from Nineveh, c.2300 B.C.; Iraq Mus., Baghdad), from which the gemstone eyes have been stolen, and the stele of Naram-sin, a triumphal relief showing the deified grandson of Sargon in battle (2261-24 B.C.; Louvre). The Akkadians spread cuneiform writing throughout the Middle East, and even after the destruction of Sargon's empire by invasions from the east in the latter part of the 3d millennium B.C., Sumerian artistic techniques and styles exerted profound influence on contemporary and later cultures. The city of Lagash survived the invasions and was beautified by its governor Gudea with numerous works of art. These were carved of dark, hard diorite; many represented the dignified and serene seated figure of Gudea himself. Although most are small in stature, they convey a sense of grandeur and monumentality. After the invasions the glory of Sumer was revived from 2200 to 2100 B.C. During this period the great ziggurat of the moon god at Ur was built.

Invasions of Semitic peoples from what are now Iran and Syria ended the last Sumerian golden age. The site of Mari has yielded the most complete archaeological evidence of Sumerian civilization during that transitional time. The great Mari royal palace with its labyrinthine corridors, frescoed walls, royal residential rooms, courts and temple buildings, and scribal school containing more than 25,000 cuneiform tablets, reveal the brilliance of a vanished world.

Babylonian Art

In the 18th cent. B.C., Babylonia under Hammurabi rose to power and dominated Mesopotamia. A diorite head, wide-eyed, bearded, and hatted, found at Susa (1792-50 B.C.; Louvre), is generally taken to be a portrait of Hammurabi. The surface is carved to show the marks of aging on a sensitive face. The great basalt stele found in Susa upon which Hammurabi's immortal code of law is inscribed bears a relief at the top showing the king himself before the sun god who commands him to set down the law for his people (c.1750 B.C.; Louvre). Hammurabi is also represented kneeling in prayer in a sculpture in the round that is colored green and on which the hands and face have been gilded (from Larsa; Louvre).

A sculpture from Mari of a fertility goddess (Aleppo Mus.), holding a vase from which water flows down her skirt, further attests to the genius of Babylonian sculptors. Several examples of terra-cotta plaques of this period in the Louvre depict scenes of Babylonian daily life, including agricultural pursuits and crafts such as carpentry. Babylonia was also a glassmaking center, but far less glass than sculpture has survived its destructive climate.

After Hammurabi's death Mesopotamia was torn for centuries by foreign invasions. For a time the Assyrian warrior people held sway and established some cultural coherence (see Assyrian art). One of their kings, Sennacherib, razed the city of Babylon. Babylonia was not to be reborn until Nebuchadnezzar divided the Assyrian lands with the Medes in 612 B.C. Under his rule the Babylonians developed to perfection one of their most striking arts: the great polychrome-glazed brick walls modeled in relief, the foremost example of which is the Ishtar gates of Babylon. These, produced for Nebuchadnezzar, contain 575 reliefs of lions, dragons, and bulls of superb workmanship (6th cent. B.C.; one lion exhibited at the Metropolitan Mus.).

The king's palace, with its courtyard and hanging (balconied) gardens (constructed more than a century before Nebuchadnezzar came to power), the Ishtar gates, and the royal processional road made Babylon a city of unrivaled magnificence in its time. Its artisans were able to draw upon materials and styles from an area bounded only by Egypt and India. The new splendor was short-lived; less than a century later Babylonia fell prey to more invasions, and the Persians, Greeks, and Romans ruled in succession. The great Mesopotamian civilizations eventually crumbled. They were forgotten until archaeologists of the 19th cent. A.D. began to bring to light something of their history and appearance.

Colonial Architecture in Central America

The earliest buildings, constructed of impermanent materials, have disappeared, but by the end of the 16th cent. durable monumental architecture had been achieved. Most of the buildings of this time, including the cathedrals, were built for military purposes and were consequently massive and plain. This was a period of transition from Spanish Gothic to Spanish Renaissance, with many buildings reminiscent of the plateresque style, with contrasting bare walls and ornamental doorways, and others of the austerity of the Escorial.

Although elaborate and intricate ornamentation was often employed, particularly in later times, a strong strain of simple, solid construction ran through the colonial period, as exemplified in the Spanish missions of California and the 18th-century Jesuit missions of Paraguay. The earliest cathedral in the New World, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (1512-41), has a plateresque portal on the west facade. In 16th-century Mexico the great builders were the Augustinian, Franciscan, and Dominican monastic orders. They introduced the open chapel, as in the monastery of San Francisco Tlalmanalco, which was built with only three walls in order to speed construction and to accommodate more people. The cathedrals of Puebla, Mérida, and Guadalajara were also begun in this period.

During most of the 17th and 18th cent. the baroque style held sway, and in the 18th cent. the sumptuous Churrigueresque ornamentation (see under Churriguera) of Spain was exported to the colonies. In addition to employing the large forms and curving lines of the traditional European baroque, Spanish colonial buildings maintained the contrast between decorated and plain surfaces of the earlier period. A more conservative trend was manifested in Colombia, where churches and public buildings were simple and severe.

Baroque features, combined with the inventiveness of native artisans, reached a climax in the cathedral in Mexico City. It has been called ultrabaroque because of its strong light-and-shade patterns, richly carved columns and entablatures, and violent alternations of curves and angles. In the late 1960s much of the cathedral was damaged by fire and had to undergo restoration. In the Puebla region glazed tiles were sometimes placed on the whole facade of a building, as in the Church of San Francisco Acatepec. Central American buildings were generally provincial versions of the Mexican, but in Guatemala structures were lower and of heavier proportions as a protection against earthquakes.

Colonial Art in Central America

Colonial artists, many of them indigenous people, devoted themselves principally to the depiction of religious subjects from the New Testament. Native sculptors, notably in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru, but also in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay, developed a powerful folk art; polychromed wood, terra-cotta, and bas-relief work in the walls and columns of churches were widely used media. A favorite subject of sculptures was the agony of Jesus; these figures, often given native features, are characterized by extraordinary pathos. In painting, the conceptions were frequently original and charged with remarkable intensity and piety. By 1600 numerous European artists had emigrated to the New World and contributed their talents, but the indigenous people, who had excelled at wall painting, books, and mosaics before the conquest, were chiefly responsible for giving colonial art its unique flavor. (For the history of painting and sculpture in Middle America, see Mexican art and architecture).

Colonial Arts in the Andes

In the Andean region Flemish and Italian influences are evident in the great painting centers of Bogotá and Quito, but Cuzco was the main center of pictorial productivity, and here the contribution of the native artist was of paramount importance. Native strains were also noticeable in the design of broadsides and aleluyas of the 18th and 19th cent. This art form, often called folk lithography, was common in Mexico and Venezuela and was often political in nature.

Andean Architecture

In the architecture of the Andean region, as in Mexico, there was richness and inventiveness, but with some significant variations. One of the most important 16th-century buildings was the Church of San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador, in which Spanish and Italian styles were blended. In Peru architects preferred heavier and more massive forms. Huge curving forms projected over doors and windows in many buildings of Lima. Columns in Mexico were freely carved with great fantasy; in Peru they were heavy and often spiral. Peruvian wall surfaces were divided into a series of large compartments rather than covered with shallow carving, as were those of Mexico.

The Church of San Agustín (1720), with a statue in the central niche dominating the whole facade, illustrates a distinctive type developed in Lima. In S Peru and in Bolivia native influence in ornamentation, in both technique and representation, pervaded the basic European architectural forms. On the facade of the Church of San Lorenzo (1728-44) in Potosí, richly decorated native figures function as caryatids or spiral columns.

Early Works

Aside from important prehistoric remains, including cave paintings at Altamira and at Cogul, near Lleida (see Paleolithic art), the earliest monuments date from the Roman occupation (3d cent. B.C.-5th cent. A.D.). Little remains of the works of the Visigothic period (6th-7th cent.), although crude classical motifs were used, especially in the decorative sculpture. Such Visigothic monuments as the Church of San Juan de Baños in the province of Palencia (A.D. 661) suggest a possible Middle Eastern influence in the use of a flattened horseshoe arch.

Moorish and Asturian Influences

The full horseshoe arch introduced by the Moors (8th cent.) and extensively employed in the famous mosque at Córdoba (8th-10th cent.). In their palaces and mosques the Moors developed certain architectural features that have remained part of the Spanish tradition down to the present day. Moorish interiors, subdivided into isolated units, are cool and graceful and utilize intricate effects of light and shadow, as in the famous Court of the Lions in the Alhambra (Granada). This tendency to enframe space is reflected in the enclosed choirs of almost all Spanish cathedrals and collegiate churches. Other Moorish elements, such as multifoil and intersecting arches, influenced the Christian buildings of medieval Spain, as did the Moorish love of reiteration and multiplicity of small motifs in luxuriant flat ornament (exemplified in the Alhambra).

By 850 the Moors had conquered all Spain except the Asturias region. Characteristic of Asturian churches (9th cent.) is a basilican plan with square apses, rounded arches, and balustered windows. In Santa Maria de Naranco (mid-9th cent.) is found one of the earliest uses of barrel vaulting in the Middle Ages. The art and architecture of the Mozarabs (9th-11th cent.), combining Asturian and Moorish features, produced some of the most original and interesting European buildings of the time.

The Romanesque Period

During the Romanesque period (11th-12th cent.) Christian Spain in general exhibited characteristics common to the Romanesque style of Europe, but with traces of Middle Eastern influence. The cathedral at Santiago de Compostela (11th-12th cent.) reveals striking analogies in both architecture and sculpture to Burgundian works.

The Gothic Period: Architecture

With the gradual unification of the Spanish kingdoms, there was increased prosperity and artistic activity during the Gothic period (13th-mid-16th cent.). Castilian architecture was basically French-inspired, although a distinctly native taste can be felt in the proportions and more ornate decorative features. Outstanding examples include the cathedrals of Burgos, Toledo, and León, the last remarkable also for its stained glass. Catalan Gothic architecture, exemplified in the cathedrals at Barcelona and Palma de Majorca, made distinctive use of wide naves with two side aisles instead of the usual four; they have heavy interior buttresses and lateral chapels. At Girona the aisles were suppressed altogether, so that the cathedral had one of the widest vaulted spans of medieval Europe.

A pervasive element in Spanish architecture is the Mudéjar style, whose influence lasted well into the 18th cent. The favorite materials of the Mudéjar builders were brick, plaster, and wood, which they employed with singular versatility. Their decoration is distinguished by the use of the elaborate geometrical configurations and stylizations associated with most Islamic art. Gothic churches, particularly in the south, are frequently crowned by Mudéjar artesonados, or wooden roofs.

The Gothic Period: Art

Early Gothic sculpture was predominantly influenced by French models. In the 15th and early 16th cent. there were strong Flemish and German trends. Retables and choir stalls were elaborately sculptured and polychromed, the former being sometimes made of alabaster. Remarkable examples include those in the cathedrals of Tarragona, Seville, and Toledo. At the end of the 15th cent. Gil de Siloe executed the magnificent retable and royal monuments in the church of Miraflores (near Burgos), representative of a late Gothic realism.

In painting of the 13th and 14th cent. there was a diffusion throughout Spain of the elegant and courtly style of French and Sienese artists, although strikingly expressive and original works of art were created by masters such as Ferrer Bassa and Luis Borassá. Extensive trade with the Netherlands in the 15th cent. encouraged the emergence of a Hispano-Flemish style, exemplified in the paintings of Jaume Huguet. A successful combination of Moorish and Flemish elements was developed in the works of the painter Fernando Gallego.

The Renaissance and Mannerism

In the 16th cent. Italian sculptors working in Spain, such as Jacopo Fiorentino, Domenico Fancelli, and Pietro Torrigiano, did much to popularize Renaissance motifs, which were combined with Gothic and Mudéjar in works of the plateresque style. An outstanding monument of the plateresque style is the cathedral of Granada by Diego Siloe. Its rotunda in particular, designed on the model of the Holy Sepulcher at Jerusalem, also reflects the humanistic aspirations of its architects, who were classically inclined. Typical of the more ornamental plateresque are the facade of the Univ. of Salamanca (c.1520-30) and that of the Convent of San Marcos (León). A more developed High Renaissance style appears in such works as the unfinished palace of Charles V (Granada), designed by Pedro Machuca, and the Escorial, designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo and finished by Juan de Herrera.

Outstanding native sculptors, such as Alonso Berruguete, Juan de Juni, and Gregorio Fernández, were strongly influenced by the more tortuous creations of Donatello and Michelangelo. Italianate painters, such as Luis de Vargas and Luis de Morales, and later Juan de Juanes, developed eclectic and mannerist styles. It was only toward the end of the century that a genius appeared who truly incarnated the dark, mystical Spanish idiom—El Greco. With roots in the Byzantine and Venetian traditions and in his very personal version of mannerism, El Greco translated aspects of Italian form in terms of his own highly spiritual, incandescent vision.

The Baroque Period

The baroque period (17th-mid 18th-century) was marked by decisive affirmation of native taste and individual genius in all the arts. Polychrome religious sculptures by Juan Martínez Montañés, Alonso Cano, and Pedro de Mena exemplify characteristic effects of extreme realism and an inward spirituality. Similarly in painting, sobriety of color and insistent naturalism, as well as dramatic contrasts of light and shade, were typical of such masters as Ribalta, Ribera, Navarrete, and Zurbarán, who are sometimes linked with Caravaggio and the Italians known for their dark palettes, termed tenebrosi [gloomy]. However, the outstanding master of the period was Velázquez, one of the greatest figures in the history of art. His paintings are admired as much for their display of technical virtuosity as for their profundity of characterization. The works of Murillo revealed a tendency to lyricism and decorative effects.

In architecture an extreme reaction against the severity and restraint of Renaissance forms manifested itself in the Churrigueresque style (see under Churriguera), which was characterized by animation of surface, play of light and shade effects, and an exaggeration and sumptuousness of ornament. Examples of Churrigueresque architecture include the Transparente in Toledo cathedral and the sacristy of the Cartuja (Granada). The style was imported into the American colonies (see Spanish colonial art and architecture), where many examples of the style can still be seen.

Under the Bourbons there was strong reaction against the individualism and exuberance of late baroque art. The founding in 1752 of the first of the Spanish academies of art resulted in a wave of sterile academic neoclassicism that tended to discourage creativity in the arts for nearly two centuries. The great exception to the general decline was Francisco Goya, who detailed in his works the corruption and brutality of this era in Spanish history.

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Classic, Romantic, and Modern

Among 19th-century painters, José de Madrazo y Agudo belonged with the school of Jacques-Louis David and Mariano Fortuny with French romantic and historical painters. The foremost architect working in the neoclassical style was Juan de Villanueva. At the turn of the century the architect Antonio Gaudí designed a number of startling and enormously original structures in Barcelona, including the Expiatory Church of the Holy Family.

The foremost of modern painters, Pablo Picasso, though born a Spaniard, is permanently associated with the school of Paris, as are the cubist Juan Gris, the surrealists Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, and the sculptor Julio González. Nonetheless, each has in his style something that is distinctively Spanish in origin. In the 1950s there was an outburst of abstract expressionism in Spain represented in the works of Antonio Tapies and Luis Sáez, among many others. Eduardo Chillida is a major modern Spanish sculptor, as are Francisco Barón, José Luis Sánchez y Gabino, and Martin Chirino. Notable contemporary painters include Luis Ficto José Francés, and Rafael Canogar.

The Decorative Arts

In general, Spanish minor arts exhibit characteristics analogous to those of the major arts in the corresponding periods. Rich mineral resources in Spain and later in the colonies made for extensive development of wrought metalwork. Luxuriantly decorated iron church screens or rejas (see rejería) are characteristically Spanish. Moorish influence encouraged development of filigree and enamel as well as tooled leather. Flemish influence encouraged the establishment of tapestry works. In the 18th cent. Buen Retiro porcelains (named for the palace at Madrid) were among the finest ceramics produced in Europe.

Early History

As Hinduism and Buddhism were introduced to Southeast Asia, their traditions were altered to conform to the traditions of the indigenous peoples. Works predating outside influence were generally made of perishable materials and have not survived. Neolithic sites in the area produced stone tools, baskets, and pottery. The Bronze age in Southeast Asia dates from about 800 B.C.; by c.500 B.C. there were recognizable divisions between those cultures influenced by China and those influenced by India.

The Dongson (or Dong Son) culture, which was centered around the Tonkin gulf in present-day Vietnam, was notable among those drawing influence from China. From this culture various artifacts of great beauty have been excavated such as bronze dagger hilts, ornaments, lamps, and tomb furnishings. Typical of Dongson style are spirals and Greek key ornamentation. Massive bronze drums for burial with the dead are also part of Dongson culture. Such drums are thought to have been part of rituals to create rain. Han China conquered much of the Dongson area in 111 B.C. after which Chinese taste and techniques became predominant in the area.

Opportunities for trade between W Indochina and India flourished and brought with commerce an influx of Indian expertise in mechanical engineering, social hierarchies, and a pantheon of deities both Hindu and Buddhist. The ancient kingdom of Fou Nan (or Funan, a name given by Chinese historians) spreading into Indonesia was a commercially based and powerful force in the area. Stone temples after the Indian prototypes are found dating back to Fou Nan in the 6th cent. The Fou Nan kingdom eventually moved up the Mekong and united with the Chen La (or Chenla) kingdom and flourished in the middle area of the Mekong. Its early monuments which anticipate Khmer art are for the most part statues of gods and goddesses whose smooth and gracefully sinuous bodies are clothed in draperies of extreme thinness.

Khmer Art

The late 8th cent. saw the disintegration of Chen La, and beginning in the early 9th cent. the Khmer empire of present-day Cambodia began to flourish. Indravarman (877-89), the first Khmer king, began construction of Angkor, a remarkable temple-city which utilized a grid system of canals and large reservoirs to control the river (see Angkor for descriptions of Angkor, Angkor Wat, and Angkor Thom). The temples and palace complex derived much of their architectural style from Indian sources, but much of the style of carving on the deities and supporting figures is uniquely Khmer, with voluptuous figures and serenely smiling faces. So richly decorated were most of the monuments that entire building complexes become a sculptural whole. The empire spread and its wealth increased into the 11th cent.

The most famous of Khmer monuments is Angkor Wat (or Vat), a vast temple-complex built in the early 12th cent. under Suryavarman II. It is an enclosure built of numerous shrines and courtyards the entirety of which represents the cosmic order in architectural sculpture. The Champa kingdom invaded Angkor in the 12th cent., and although it was reclaimed by Khmer kings it no longer had the same splendor. Angkor Thom and Bayon, built in the early 13th cent. under Jayavarman VII, shows the movement away from grace and lyrical carvings toward a more monumental style. From the 15th until the 18th cent. most of the art of Cambodia was wood sculpture, which due to climatic conditions has with rare exception not survived. Later works mostly follow the inspiration of Thai sculpture.

Vietnamese Art

The Champa kingdom which was situated in Annam, lower Vietnam, was roughly contemporary with Chen La. Champa art is best typified by the sculpture associated with architecture, in which lavish ornament is paired with vigorous sensuality. Champa art declined altogether after the 13th cent. China held the Tonkin gulf area as a vassal state until the 10th cent. when the Vietnamese in 938 seized power from the T'ang. Much of the art owes its influence to Chinese models and neighboring Champa styles. Of particular note are ceramics similar to some provincial Sung Chinese wares.

Thai Art

In the 13th cent. the Thai peoples began to amass their considerable power in western Southeast Asia and by the 15th cent. were the dominant force. Siamese bronze sculpture of Buddhist figures in the 14th and 15th cent. showed an interest in an exaggerated elongation of limbs, a serene countenance and an interest in the pose known as the "walking Buddha." In the 16th cent. Buddhist figures adorned with jewels were widespread. Most extant Siamese paintings are of Buddhist subject matter and owe much to Chinese models, yet include a graceful linear quality and affection for brilliant color. The establishment of the capital at Bangkok and consequent increase in trade with the West brought other influences to bear on Thai art.

Laotian and Burmese Art

Laotian art was heavily influenced by neighboring Siam. Thai kingdoms were established there in the latter 14th cent., and in art and architecture Thai and Burmese models were followed. A few temples of stucco and brick survive but for the most part the typical Laotian architectural medium was and is wood, encompassing the quintessential Southeast Asian roof line of graceful upward sweeping curves. In Myanmar the lower Ayeyarwady valley was the most populous area, and Buddhist art forms merged with native beliefs in Nats. In Pagan a 9th-century Nat temple is among the earliest examples of Burmese architecture. Many examples of later date have the typical Burmese flame element, either above the windows or as part of the roof ornamentation. In their sculptural tradition, the Burmese were conservative, initially following Indian styles and later Khmer and Thai models. Burmese lacquerware, made for use in temples and monasteries, is one of the most celebrated of Burmese arts.

Indonesian Art

On the islands of Indonesia, there have been found artifacts from the Dongson culture, including the famous bronze drum known as the "Moon of Bali," the largest of the "rain drums." The culture of the Indonesian islands was strongly influenced by India. The great dynasty of Shailendra (776-864) from central Java made its influence known as far north as Cambodia. Sculptures from 9th-century Hindu temples in central Java show the influence of Indian models. Chandi Mendut, c.A.D. 800, is a Buddhist shrine incorporating many bas-reliefs which show the Javanese interest in sinuous forms and elegant composition.

The supreme achievement of Indonesian art is the monument of Borobudur, an architectural monument and cosmic diagram in one, built in the 8th cent. Receding terraces mount skyward and support on their walls bas-relief sculptures of great beauty and refinement. Buddhas appear at intervals along the walls, and the highest terraces house 72 Buddhas in stone latticework stupas. Bronze sculptures of Buddhist figures made after the 8th cent. continue the style of Borobudur. In the 11th cent. rock-cut reliefs continue the Javanese sculptural tradition. With the advent of Islam in the 15th cent., figural sculpture was abandoned and ornamentation of mosques took over the Indonesian interest in architectural embellishment. Modern Indonesia has taken a renewed interest in traditional crafts and art forms.

Early History

The Scandinavian countries are rich in artifacts and objects of archaeological interest dating from the end of the Ice Age through the Bronze Age, the Celtic and Germanic Iron Ages, and the Viking period. Viking art (c.800-c.1050) is characterized by dynamic geometric design of considerable complexity and sophistication and the ingenious use of animal forms. It bears a clear relationship to other European trends, particularly to Hiberno-Saxon illumination. Numerous fine examples of early Scandinavian art are in the collections of the museums of Copenhagen and Stockholm.

The Early Christian Period

Church building became the principal artistic activity when Scandinavia was Christianized in the 11th cent. The wooden stavkirke, a medieval church decorated with grotesque figures, is unique to this region; examples remain only in Norway, where it was most prevalent. The cathedral at Lund, Sweden, begun in 1085, reveals Lombard influence; Gothic elements predominate in the cathedrals of Linköping and Skara. The island of Gotland produced numerous sculptural and architectural masterworks of the Gothic period. The cathedral at Trondheim, begun in the 12th cent., bears a resemblance to English Gothic architecture, particularly to Lincoln Cathedral. Uppsala Cathedral was built by French architects.

The Renaissance and Baroque Period

Foreign stylistic influence persisted through the Renaissance and baroque periods, the North German school of Lübeck becoming more and more the chief source for Scandinavian styles. Castles such as Gripsholm exemplify this borrowing habit. Great castle-building activity was instigated by the Danish and Swedish rulers of the 16th to 18th cent.; outstanding examples include Kronborg (c.1570-1590) and Fredriksborg (c.1560-1620) castles and the rebuilt castle of Stockholm (1690-1708; 1727-53).

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

In the 18th and 19th cent. native artists began to gain international prestige. From Denmark the neoclassicist sculptor A. B. Thorvaldsen taught and worked in Rome, wielding enormous stylistic influence. The painters Christoffer Eckersberg and N. A. Abildgaard were prominent, as were the architects C. F. Harsdorff and C. E. Hansen. The academy of Copenhagen attracted students from Germany, including the painters P. O. Runge and C. D. Friedrich.

Norway produced its best-known artists late in the 19th cent.—most notably the sculptors Stephan Sinding and A. G. Vigeland and the protoexpressionist painter Edvard Munch. Significant Swedish artists included the sculptor J. T. Sergel and, in the late 19th and early 20th cent., the painters A. L. Zorn and Carl Larsson.

The Twentieth Century

The Swedish sculptor Carl Milles, who worked extensively in the United States, was among the most notable Scandinavian artists of the early part of the century. Since World War II various strains of abstraction have been developed by a number of Scandinavian artists.

The inventive use of traditional and regional forms within the plain vocabulary of brick construction led to a rejuvenation of Scandinavian architecture in the early 20th cent. with the works of P. V. J. Klint of Denmark and Ragnar Ostberg, Sigfrid Ericsson, and, above all, E. G. Asplund of Sweden. The Finnish architects Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto influenced Scandinavian design profoundly and have international acclaim for establishing an unquestionably new architecture. Modern Scandinavian furniture and applied arts, particularly glassmaking, metalwork, woodwork, and ceramics, have been widely imitated for their simplicity and purity of line.

Early Christian Works

With the Christianization of Russia in the late 10th cent. the Russian church and its art became subject to Constantinople (see Byzantine art and architecture). Major artistic centers developed in Kiev, Novgorod, and Pskov. Although the early churches were made largely of wood (with strong Norse stylistic influences), stone was already in use in the Cathedral of St. Sophia (1018-37) in Kiev. A distinctive Russian style soon emerged, marked by steeply sloping roofs and high walls, a proliferation of domes, and later a compartmentalization of interior space into many aisles and apses. The typical onion-shaped dome made an early appearance (mid-12th cent.) in the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Sancta Sophia in Novgorod. In the 12th cent. the Vladimir-Suzdal region became an important cultural center. There the Western Romanesque was combined with Byzantine elements, as in the palace of Andrei Bogolyubsky.

The Art of the Icon

The earliest painters of religious art in Russia were Greeks or Greek-trained Russians, who generally followed the form and iconography of the Byzantine school (see icon). Within the framework of the highly schematic Byzantine rendering of the human figure, Russian art (11th-14th cent.) ranged from an extremely hieratic and intellectual concept to a softer, more devotional image. The Russians added a number of saints to the Byzantine hierarchy. Among those frequently depicted were saints Vladimir, Olga, Boris, Gleb, and later Alexander Nevsky. From the mid-13th through the 14th cent. little art flourished under the Tatar invaders except in Novgorod and Pskov, which remained free and were the dominant cultural centers until the rise of Moscow at the end of the 15th cent.

Icon painting was brought to its highest achievement as a Russian art form in the late 14th and 15th cent. with the expressive frescoes of the Greek painter Theophanes, in the church of the Transfiguration in Novgorod (1378), and with the Hellenized works of the Russian artist Andrei Rublev (e.g., Trinity, c.1410; Tretyakov Gall., Moscow). The master Dionysius introduced new iconographical motifs, scenes of miracles, which he imbued with great vitality. A high level of quality was maintained in icon painting until the 17th cent., when it deteriorated into an ornate, extremely detailed, convention-ridden art.

The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the Russian church became independent of the Greek Orthodox faith, and the Moscow school of art and architecture became the official liturgical and court art of Russia, maintaining this status until the 18th cent. In the 16th cent. art was first pressed into the service of the government. Frescoes such as The Heart of the Czar Is in the Hand of God decorated the palace walls of Ivan IV.

In architecture a new period began in the 15th cent., when the first of many Italian architects were invited to work on the Kremlin in Moscow (see under kremlin). The Cathedral of the Dormition (1475-79), planned by Aristotele Fioravanti, is notable for a new rationality of proportions, and Italian High Renaissance elements can also be seen in the decoration (pilasters, scallop shells, and arches) of the Cathedral of St. Michael (1505-9), built by Alevisio Novi. On the other hand, the Russo-Byzantine style was still very much in favor under Ivan IV. The Cathedral of St. Basil (1555-60) was designed by two Russian architects, Postnik and Barma, who combined several chapels into one unique and splendid church. With its profusion of oddly shaped cupolas, gilt and polychrome arches, and air of fairy-tale fantasy, it served as a model for Russian churches until the 17th cent.

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

During the 17th cent. influences from Lithuania and Poland brought about a humanistic interest in classical antiquity that was to culminate in the Westernization of Russia under Peter the Great. In 1712 Peter moved his capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg and began the transformation of a mud flat on the coast of Finland into a sparkling European city. A host of Western architects was imported for the enterprise and continued to work under successive reigns. The outstanding architect of the period was Conte Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli. Working in a rococo style, he designed the Winter Palace (now part of the Hermitage), Smolny Cathedral, and the facade at Peterhof, one of the most beautiful buildings in St. Petersburg.

Catherine the Great preferred a more dignified manner. The Italian Antonio Rinaldi (c.1709-c.1790), the French architect Jean Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe (1729-1800), and the Scottish Charles Cameron (c.1740-c.1815) were responsible for the neoclassical architecture that Catherine promoted as the official court style. Prominent Russian architects during her reign included V. I. Bazhenov (1737-99) and I. Y. Starov (1744-1808); the latter built the splendid Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg.

In the 18th cent. the infiltration of European painting styles began, and for the first time since the introduction of Christianity sculpture became a major Russian art form. European artists such as Falconet and Vigée Le Brun, came to St. Petersburg while Russian artists started to receive their training abroad. Portrait and historical painting predominated. Under Alexander I foreign architects were still imported, including Thomas de Thoman (1754-1813), who built the Bolshoi Theatre. The Greek revival style also came into vogue, and is revealed in the buildings of M. F. Kazakov (1733-1812), A. D. Zakharov (1761-1811), and V. P. Stasov (1769-1848).

The Nineteenth Century

During the 19th cent. there was a revival of medieval Russian architecture. A romantic school of painting arose in the early years of the century, and pictorial epics were produced by Karl Briullov (1799-1852), F. A. Bruni (1800-1875), and A. A. Ivanov (1806-58). The second half of the 19th cent. saw the introduction of ideological realism, particularly in the works of V. G. Perov (1833-82) and I. Y. Repin, who is now hailed as one of the first artists of the revolution. Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910), a tormented original and one of the foremost modern Russian masters, painted a remarkable series of decorations for the monastery of St. Cyril at Kiev.

The Twentieth Century

Around the turn of the century Mir Iskusstva (World of Art Group) was initiated, a movement akin to art nouveau. It served as the background for some of the first truly abstract artists who prevailed briefly in Russia after the 1917 revolution (see constructivism and suprematism). Among the more radical modern artists were Casimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Chaim Soutine, Aleksey von Jawlensky, Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo, Wassily Kandinsky, Mikhail Larinov, Marc Chagall, and Alexander Archipenko. Most of them left the country after 1923 and settled in Western Europe and the United States.

The Ministry of Culture soon took over the direction of Russian art, and a standardized literal style known as socialist realism was enforced while abstraction was renounced as decadent. Socialist realist artists include Georgi Nisski and Vera Mukina. Only with the death of Stalin was there a slight relaxation of government strictures, although artists working in an abstract idiom continued to be rarely exhibited and harshly criticized. From the mid-1950s to the decline of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, so-called nonconformist art was widely practiced in the USSR. This late Soviet art encompassed a number of styles, met with official disapproval, was infrequently seen by the public, and often dealt with the harshness of life in the USSR. Among the leading artists of the period were Ilya Kabakov, Leonid Lamm, and Yevgeny Rukhin. Under Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership and with the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, artistic freedom has increased markedly. Russian architecture in the 20th cent., after a brief phase of constructivist experimentation in the 1920s, tended toward an unimaginative combination of neoclassicism and skyscraper construction.

Romanesque Architecture

The specific character of the Romanesque style can be understood only in the light of the development of early medieval architecture in the West, notably its Carolingian and Ottonian phases. Certain of the most characteristic features of Romanesque structures—the massive west facade crowned by a tower or by twin towers, the complex design of the eastern part housing the sanctuary, the rhythmic alternation of piers and columns in the nave—represent only the advanced stages in a lengthy and complex formal evolution marked by considerable trial and error.

The development of Romanesque architecture owes much to the primacy accorded to vaulting. Masonry vaulting (see vault) since the beginning of Christian architecture had been confined to buildings of relatively small scale and to crypts. Large basilican structures, in a continuation of a tradition inaugurated by the early Christian basilica, were topped by wooden roofs. Romanesque churches, on the other hand, with notable exceptions in Normandy and Italy, sustained massive barrel vaults, making mandatory the reinforcement of load-bearing walls in order to parry the lateral outward thrust. The frequent presence of galleries above the aisles, sometimes with half-barrel vaults, is in all probability rooted in structural considerations connected with the problem of abutment. The limitation of wall openings to a minimum, related to the same concern, contributed to the sober yet somberly impressive character of the light.

The major share of architectural activity was sponsored by the great monastic communities. The Cluniac order, at the peak of its power, played a primary role in the patronage of construction. Thus a number of significant Cluniac churches connected with great 12th-century pilgrimages—St. Martin in Tours, St. Sernin in Toulouse, and Santiago de Compostela in Spain—show great similarity in plan and overall design. This sameness is especially notable in the presence of spacious ambulatories with radiating chapels designed to facilitate the pilgrims' access to the precious relics. The design of the third church of Cluny, dedicated in 1095, is reflected in a number of Burgundian churches. The basilica of San Marco in Venice and other Byzantine structures help to account for the presence of domed vaulting in a group of churches in French Aquitaine. German Romanesque architecture on the other hand remained strongly tied to the heritage of Ottonian art.

The following structures are noted works of Romanesque architecture: France—the abbey churches of St. Madeleine Vézelay (c.1090-1130) and Paray-le-Monial (early 12th cent.); Germany—the Cathedral of Speyer, dedicated in 1060, but largely reconstructed after 1082, and the Church of St. Mary on the Capitol in Cologne (1049); Italy—the cathedral (1063-92) and baptistery (1153) in Pisa, the Church of San Miniato al Monte (c.1070) in Florence, and the Cathedral of Monreale in Sicily (1174). From the last third of the 12th cent. certain features of the churches in N France and in England began to point toward the development of the Gothic (see Norman architecture). Similarly, architecture in the Ile-de-France, particularly the ambulatory (1140) of the abbey of St. Denis, reveals such an advance in unified design and construction as to be considered the first monument of Gothic architecture.

Romanesque Art

The art of the Romanesque period was characterized by an important revival of monumental forms, notably sculpture and fresco painting, which developed in close association with architectural decoration and exhibited a forceful and often severely structural quality. At the same time an element of realism, which parallels the first flowering of vernacular literature, came to the fore. It was expressed in terms of a direct and naive observation of certain details drawn from daily life and a heightened emphasis on emotion and fantasy. For many aspects of its rich imagery Romanesque art depended on the heritage of antiquity and of earlier medieval art, while the prestige of Byzantine art remained high in Western eyes. The pilgrimages and Crusades contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the formal vocabulary through the development of closer contacts between regional cultures and distant peoples.

The first important monuments of Romanesque sculpture were created in the last decade of the 11th cent. and the first decades of the 12th cent. The primary source of artistic patronage was provided by the monastic institutions, for whom sculptors executed large relief carvings for the decoration of church portals and richly ornate capitals for cloisters. Romanesque sculpture produced an art of extraordinary ornamental complexity, ecstatic in expression, and abounding in seemingly endless combinations of zoomorphic, vegetal, and abstract motifs.

In France themes portrayed on tympanums of such churches as Moissac, Vézelay, and Autun emphasized the awesome majesty of Christ as ruler and judge of the universe. They often depicted terrifying spectacles of hell. English sculpture showed a tendency toward geometric ornamentation. However, with the introduction in England of continental influences in the mid-12th cent. there also appeared gruesome renditions of the Last Judgment, e.g., at Lincoln Cathedral. In contrast with the demonic nature and animated quality of sculpture in France and in England, there was an assertion of more massive and ponderous figures in N Italy, with the narrative reliefs from Genesis designed by Wiligelmo in Modena and by Niccolò in Verona.

Another aspect of the Romanesque revival was the production of metalwork objects, of which many outstanding examples, such as crucifixes, reliquary shrines, and candlesticks, are still preserved in church treasuries. The most productive centers of this art were the regions adjacent to the Rhine and the Meuse rivers, where the art of bronze casting reached a level of technical mastery sufficient to permit the execution of works of considerable dimension. An outstanding example of Mosan bronze casting is the baptismal font of St. Barthelemy in Liège, a large vessel supported by 12 oxen and decorated with scenes in high relief, executed by Rainer of Huy between 1107 and 1118. It was during this same period that Limoges, in central France, became an extremely active center of metalwork production, specializing in enamelwork.

Fresco painting has been more adversely affected by the accidents of time, but several large cycles, as well as numerous other fragments of Romanesque wall painting, have survived. The large and relatively unbroken expanses of wall space within Romanesque buildings presented an excellent ground for the work of the painter, and the basic forms of Romanesque fresco painting are typically monumental in scale and bold in coloristic effect. Among the foremost examples of this art still largely extant are the cycles of Saint-Savin in western France and Sant'Angelo in Formis in S Italy.

Manuscript illumination of the Romanesque period was characterized by a vast enlargement of the traditional fund of pictorial imagery, although in terms of overall execution and calligraphic quality Romanesque illuminated books often show a certain carelessness and lack of refinement. The Psalter, as in the early Middle Ages, continued to be the most widely read volume for religious use, and numerous sumptuously illuminated copies of this work were executed. The Romanesque scriptorium also produced large editions of the Bible, often extending to several volumes. A splendid example of such a work is the Winchester Bible, executed in the course of several generations and decorated with numerous scenes from the Old and the New Testaments. Romanesque manuscripts are enlivened by elaborate and highly inventive initial letters, on which the artists of this period lavished their bent for rich ornamental display.

Early Influences

From the 7th to the 3d cent. B.C., Etruscan art flourished throughout central Italy, including Latium and Rome. It was strongly influenced by the early art of Greece, although it lacked the basic sense of rational order and structural composition of the Greek models. The influence of native Italic and Middle Eastern art was also strongly felt, particularly during the archaic period (before c.400 B.C.).

Sculpture

Large polychrome terra-cotta images, such as the Apollo of Veii (Villa Giulia, Rome), sandstone tomb effigies, and tomb paintings reveal a native feeling for voluminous forms and bold decorative color effects and an exuberant, vital spirit. From c.400 B.C. through the Hellenistic age, the vitality of the archaic period gave way to imitation of the Greek classical models combined with a native trend toward naturalism (Mars of Todi, Vatican). The merging of these trends produced the establishment of Hellenistic realism in Roman Italy at the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire (Orator, Museo Archeologico, Florence; Capitoline Brutus, Conservatori, Rome.).

After the conquest of Greece (c.146 B.C.), Greek artists settled in Rome, where they found a ready market for works executed in the Greek classical manner or in direct imitation of Greek originals. While the many works by these copyists are of interest principally for their reflection of earlier Greek art, they throw light on the eclecticism of Roman taste, and their influence was of paramount importance throughout the development of Roman art. Roman portraits, however, have an origin very remote and altogether Italianate. It was a Roman custom to have a death mask taken, which was then preserved along with busts copied from it in terra-cotta or bronze.

By the time of the empire, the Roman conception of art had become allied with the political ideal of service to the state. In the Augustan period (30 B.C.-A.D. 14) there was an attempt to combine realism with the Greek feeling for idealization and abstract harmony of forms. This modification is seen in the famous Augustus from Prima Porta (Vatican), which represents the first of a long series of the distinctly Roman type of portrait. Under the emperors from Tiberius through the Flavians (A.D. 14-A.D. 96) portrait busts reveal in general a growing concern with effects of pictorial refinement and psychological penetration. The magnificent reliefs from the Arch of Titus, Rome, commemorating the conquest of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, mark a climax in the development of illusionism in historical relief sculpture.

From the time of Trajan (A.D. 98-A.D. 117) the influence of the art of the Eastern provinces began to gain in importance. The spiral band of low reliefs on Trajan's Column (Rome), commemorating the wars against the Daci, employs a system of continuous narration. In the period of Hadrian (117-138) there was a reversion to the idealization of the Augustan style and at the same time a growing sense of voluptuousness. Major works from the later period of the Antonines (138-192) are the column and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (Rome).

From the time of Caracalla to the death of Constantine I (211-337) the rapid assimilation of Eastern influences encouraged a tendency toward abstraction that later developed into the stiff iconographic forms of the early Christian and Byzantine eras. The reliefs of the friezes from the Arch of Constantine, Rome (c.315), may be regarded as the last example of monumental Roman sculpture.

Painting

Roman painting, like sculpture, was strongly influenced by the art of Greece. Unfortunately, much of the painting has perished. What remains suggests that the art was conceived principally as one of interior decoration. Aside from encaustic portraits chiefly of Alexandrian origin, the largest single group of Roman paintings is from Pompeii, although parallel work exists elsewhere. The Incrustation, or Architectonic Plastic, style extended to c.80 B.C.; it was characterized by flat areas of color broken by full-scale painted pilasters in apparent imitation of marble slabs.

The Architectural style that followed lasted 70 years; it was largely influenced by stage design and employed painted columns, arches, entablatures, and pediments to frame landscapes and figure compositions, destroying the architectonic quality of the wall. Many famous paintings, such as the Aldobrandini Wedding and Odyssey Landscapes (Vatican), are believed to be Roman copies of Greek originals. By 10 B.C. the Architectural style yielded to the Ornate style, where the semblance of architectural construction became subordinate to decoration, and the paintings within the borders became prominent. Most surviving Pompeiian paintings date from the Intricate style period, which commenced about A.D. 50 and continued until the destruction of the city in A.D. 79 by the eruption of Vesuvius. Large areas of flat color enclose diminutive, graceful, and delicate scenes executed in brilliant color.

Mosaic and the Minor Arts

The continued striving after three-dimensional illusionist effects revealed in the various phases of painting was duplicated in the development of mosaics, extensively produced throughout the empire. In general the Roman minor arts tend to emphasize sumptuousness of materials and ornamentation. Cameos and golden jewelry were extensively produced. Among the most famous is the large Cameo of the Deified Augustus (Paris).

The famous pottery from Arretium (modern Arezzo) was mass-produced and widely exported. Early examples employed a black finish and aimed at imitation of metallic effects. From the time of Augustus, the ware was characterized by a deep red glaze with decorative figures in low relief applied to the body of the vase. During the 1st cent. A.D. new processes were invented for making glass, and techniques were developed for the imitation of precious stones that made possible the production of fine murrhine vases (e.g., the famous Portland vase, British Museum).

Art of the Renaissance

A radical break with medieval methods of representing the visible world occurred in Italy during the second half of the 13th cent. The sculptor Nicola Pisano evoked an interest in the forms of classical antiquity. In painting Giotto led the way in giving the human figure a greater sense of physical presence. He also worked toward a more realistic depiction of space, and his efforts were expanded during the 14th cent. in Siena by the Lorenzetti brothers. However, after the Black Death of 1348 came a marked decline in artistic activity as many artists and patrons died.

Florence became the great center of quattrocento (15th-century) art and art theory. The artist began to emerge from the role of artisan to participate in the active current of intellectual pursuits. Together with early humanists (see humanism), artists augmented their veneration of the purely celestial realm with an appreciation of all aspects of physical nature. They shared a growing esteem for the individual and a vital enthusiasm for classical antiquity. The architects Brunelleschi and Alberti and the sculptor Donatello were among the first to visit Rome in order to study the ruins of antiquity and to incorporate many of the ancient principles into their work.

At the same time artists were intensely preoccupied with problems of representing the dimensions of nature on a flat surface. With Masaccio they pioneered in developing a mathematically based illusion of space—the system of perspective. Masaccio and Uccello worked out a geometrical system, whereas Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi concentrated on a unifying color scheme. While the Florentines inclined toward an abstract simplicity of form, they never lost awareness of the visible world, particularly in their portrayal of the human figure. Antonio Pollaiuolo, Castagno, and above all Leonardo da Vinci were dedicated to the study of anatomy.

During the 15th cent. artists came to be supported not only by churchmen but also by private collectors. Besides commissioning paintings of the traditional sacred themes, these patrons created a new demand for pictures of secular subjects. For the embellishment of private palaces, painters adorned cassone (chest) panels, plates, and walls with allegorical and mythological episodes often derived from literary sources, such as the works of Petrarch and Boccaccio.

To fulfill the patrons' dreams of glory and perpetual fame, the art of portraiture began to flourish. In commemoration of notable citizens and events, medals were designed and struck by great metalworkers, such as Pisanello, in a revival of an ancient practice. Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, and Botticelli painted remarkable portraits of political leaders, at the same time emphasizing their individual characteristics and conveying an air of princely splendor. Chief among the Florentine patrons were the Medici, who fostered a group of poets, philosophers, and artists. Botticelli and Michelangelo were profoundly influenced by the Neoplatonic philosophy developed in the Medici circle.

Outside Florence there were bursts of artistic activity in Urbino, Mantua, Rimini, Milan, and Naples. Their courts attracted such artists as Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Antonello da Messina, and Leonardo, as well as a number of Flemish artists who left their mark on N Italian painting. In the early 16th cent. the leadership in Italian art shifted from Florence to Rome. The works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were the culmination of the ideals of the period. These were the men who created the short-lived but glorious style now known as the High Renaissance (c.1490-1520), characterized by order, grandeur, grace, and harmony.

Their successors sought more diversified ideals, and the style known as mannerism followed. Meanwhile, by the beginning of the 16th cent., Venetian art had come into its full glory. The great colorists Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione were succeeded by Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, who added a new freedom of brushstroke to the canvas.

The superb coloring of the Venetians was achieved as the effects of the golden age of painting in the Low Countries were felt across Europe. In the 1420s Hubert and Jan van Eyck developed an extremely effective technique of oil painting, and with it the ability to render the most subtle variations of light and color. They did not practice the system of geometric perspective, but nonetheless created a convincing appearance of reality. An exquisite sensitivity is reflected in their minute detailing of objects of daily life, which were often symbolic. Robert Campin (often identified with the Master of Flémalle), Roger van der Weyden, and Hugo van der Goes were among the most remarkable masters of 15th-century Flanders. Netherlandish painting was enriched by the wild fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch and the spirited peasant scenes of Pieter Bruegel the elder (see under Bruegel family).

In Germany, Schongauer and above all Dürer made the first and greatest contributions in the media of woodcuts and engravings. Other important German painters of the 16th cent. included Grünewald and Hans Holbein the younger. In addition, Lucas Cranach the elder straddled the Renaissance and the Reformation, producing mainly court portraits, altar pieces, and paintings.

Many artists in France continued to paint fine altarpieces in the Gothic tradition. Under the influence of Flemish and Italian art, France produced admirable portraitists such as Fouquet and Clouet. Francis I invited Italian painters and architects to his court, including Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto. In the 1530s the influence of mannerism began to be felt, particularly at Fontainebleau (see Fontainebleau, school of). Artists in England and Spain were influenced by Netherlandish painting until the 16th cent., when the Italian Renaissance began to permeate Europe.

Architecture of the Renaissance

During the Renaissance the ideals of art and architecture became unified in the acceptance of classical antiquity and in the belief that humanity was a measure of the universe. The rebirth of classical architecture, which took place in Italy in the 15th cent. and spread in the following century through Western Europe, terminated the supremacy of the Gothic style.

In Italy, there was a rediscovery and appropriation of the classical orders of architecture. Rome's structural elements, its arches, vaults, and domes, as well as its decorative forms, served as an open treasury, from which the designers of the 15th cent. unstintingly borrowed, adapting them to new needs in original combinations. Although built using Roman motifs, the churches, town halls, palaces, and villas showed new developments in plan and structure. The stone houses of Florence, of which the Medici-Riccardi Palace by Michelozzi is a principal example, are marked by a rugged simplicity. On the other hand, fondness for the free use of beautiful details led, particularly in Lombardy, to graceful designs, in which the more massive appearance of the building was submerged; the facade of the Certosa di Pavia exemplifies this spirit.

Brunelleschi, the earliest great architect of the Renaissance, produced its first examples (c.1420) in the Florentine churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito and in the revolutionary plan for the dome of the Cathedral of Florence. Alberti was the first important architectural theoretician of the Renaissance. In his works he was strongly influenced by the writings of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius; the books of both men served as a basic source of inspiration for later architects. In ecclesiastical building there was a trend toward the centralized structure. Brunelleschi, Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio, and Leonardo designed many variations on the theme, creating polygonal and Greek-cross plans. The greatest realization of the circular form was achieved by Bramante in his Tempietto (c.1502) in Rome.

Numerous palaces and churches erected in Rome gave the city architectural preeminence, and Raphael, Peruzzi, Vignola, and Michelangelo worked there, as well as Antonio da Sangallo the younger, whose Farnese Palace exemplifies the period's highest standards. Work on St. Peter's Church was begun by Bramante and carried on by a succession of the finest artists and architects that Italy produced. The classical orders, often on a monumental scale, now played the chief role in decoration. Palladio, Serlio, Vignola, and others codified the system of proportioning, and their ideas were extremely influential in the development of European architecture.

In France in the 16th cent., Renaissance taste made one of its first tentative appearances in the Louis XII wing of the château of Blois. In the first period Gothic traditions persisted in plan, structure, and exterior masses, onto which fresh and graceful Renaissance details were grafted. The movement was sponsored by Francis I, a prolific builder. Handsome and livable châteaus replaced grim feudal castles. Fontainebleau, Chambord, and Azay-le-Rideau are famous examples.

The beginning (1546) of the construction of the Louvre by Pierre Lescot usually serves as the opening date of the classical period. Classical proportions and methods of composition were assimilated, and the use of the orders became general. Although Italian models were followed, a distinctively French brand of classicism took form. The leading architects were Lescot, Philibert Delorme, and the Androuet du Cerceau family. Jean Goujon and others contributed fine sculptural adornments.

In England the Renaissance flowered in the middle of the 16th cent. The Elizabethan style and the Jacobean style applied classical motifs while retaining medieval forms. The move toward a pure and monumental classical style was largely the work of Inigo Jones, whose royal banqueting hall (1619) in London decisively established Palladian design in English architecture.

In Germany, about the middle of the 16th cent., the medieval love for picturesque forms still dominated, although transferred to classical motifs. Freely interpreted and resembling the Elizabethan work in England, these gave full play to originality and craftsmanship. The style, however, lacking truly great architects, failed to achieve full development as in France and England. Nuremberg and Rothenburg ob der Tauber are rich in works of the early period.

In the first period of the Renaissance in Spain, Gothic and Moorish forms (see Mudéjar) intermingled with the new classical ones. Under the leadership of Francisco de Herrera the younger, who imported strictly classical principles from Italy, the second period was one of correctness and formality. The palace of Charles V at Granada (1527) is its finest product.

The museum has many fine collections, the outstanding one being the John G. Johnson Collection of European old masters. The other major bequests of European art in the museum are the Wilstach, Elkins, and McFadden collections. The Gallatin, Arensberg, and Stieglitz collections of modern art, and the Crozier Collection of Persian and Chinese art are outstanding. The museum houses more than 60 paintings by Thomas Eakins. The museum owns representative selections of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art; many period rooms, including a French Romanesque cloister and a Gothic chapel; a collection of textiles and costumes; and a fine collection of Marcel Duchamp's works, including Nude Descending a Staircase.

Early Works

Although earlier civilizations are known, the first archaelogical finds of artistic importance are the superb ceramics from Susa and Persepolis (c.3500 B.C.). On tall goblets and large bowls are symmetrical designs that cover the surfaces with stylized abstractions of animals, particularly water birds and ibex. The choice of subjects from nature, simplified into almost unrecognizable patterns, may be called the formative principle of Persian art. Much of 4th-millennium Iranian art is strongly influenced by that of Mesopotamia. The 3d-millennium art of Elam, found at Sialk and Susa, also follows Mesopotamian styles, and this trend is continued in the less well-known Elam and Urartu art of the 2d millennium.

The art that comes from mountainous Luristan has aroused a good deal of controversy. Probably dated 1200-700 B.C., the many small bronze objects are thought to be mostly weapons and horse trappings—bits, bridle ornaments, rein rings, and pole tops. The treasure of Ziwiye (Sakiz), a hoard containing gold, silver, and ivory objects, included a few Luristan pieces. These provide a definite link with the art of the Scythians known as the animal style. The Ziwiye Treasure is roughly divided into four styles: Assyrian, Scythian, proto-Achaemenid (with strong Greek influences), and native, or provincial. Dated c.700 B.C., this remarkable collection of objects illustrates the heterogeneity of types and sources in early Iranian art.

The Achaemenid Period

A unified style emerges in the Achaemenid period (c.550-330 B.C.). Influenced by the Greeks, the Egyptians, and those from other provinces of the Persian Empire, the Achaemenids evolved a monumental style in which relief sculpture is used as an adjunct to massive architectural complexes. Foundations of the palace of Cyrus at Pasargadae, of Artaxerxes I at Susa, and above all extensive remains of the magnificent palace complex of Darius I and Xerxes I at Persepolis reveal plans that characteristically show great columned audience halls. In front of the halls were colonnaded porticoes, flanked by square towers and set on high terraces. The palaces were approached by double flights of steps converging at the top. Although there are marked analogies to Egyptian, Greek, and Assyrian architecture, the style as a whole and the feeling for space and scale are distinctive. The Persepolitan columns are slenderer and more closely fluted than those of Greece. Bases are high, often bell-shaped; capitals are composed of the foreparts of two bulls set back to back or of other animals above volutes with rosette ornament.

In the sculpture, of an ordered clarity and simplicity, heraldic stylization is subtly combined with effects of realism. Typical are the low stone reliefs of a procession of tribute bearers that adorn the great double staircase approaching the audience hall of Xerxes I (Persepolis) and the famous Frieze of Archers (Louvre, from the palace of Darius I at Susa), executed in molded and enameled brick, a technique of Babylonian-Assyrian origin. The great care lavished on every stone detail is also found in the fine gold and silver rhytons (drinking horns), bowls, jewelry, and other objects produced by this culture.

Parthian and Sassanid Contributions

After the death of Alexander the Great (323 B.C.), there was turmoil in Iran until the rise of the Parthians (c.250 B.C.). Theirs is essentially a crude art, synthesizing Hellenistic motifs with Iranian forms. Buildings of dressed stone and rubble and brick were decorated with sculpted heads and mural paintings. The larger-than-life-size bronze statue from Shami of a ruler is the most outstanding remaining Parthian monument.

Of far greater artistic importance is the contribution of the Sassanids, who ruled Iran from A.D. 226 to the middle of the 7th cent. Adapting and expanding previous styles and techniques, they rebuilt the Parthian capital at Ctesiphon. There a great palace with a huge barrel vault was constructed of rubble and brick. Sassanid architecture is decorated with carved stone or stucco reliefs and makes use of colorful stone mosaics. Beautiful gold and silver dishes, bowls, and ewers, often decorated with hunting scenes or animals in high relief, and textiles with symmetrical heraldic designs also remain. The Sassanids recorded their triumphs on immense outdoor rock reliefs scattered throughout Iran, often using the same sites that the Achaemenids had covered with reliefs and inscriptions.

In Afghanistan at Bamian are ruins that show the great impact of Iranian art forms on works from the 4th to the 8th cent. Frescoes and colossal Buddhas adorn Bamian's monasteries, revealing a fusion of Greco-Buddhist and Sassano-Iranian elements.

The Coming of Islam

Little remains from the early centuries of Islam in Iran, but the influence of Persia on Islamic art and architecture in Syria and Palestine is very strong. A significant innovation by the Persians is the raising of a dome over a square hall by means of squinches. Also influential was their use of cut-stucco decoration, various intricate motifs, and ever-apparent symmetry.

The earliest important Islamic monument extant in Iran is the mausoleum of Ismail the Samanid at Bukhara. Dated 907, it is a solid, square building in cut-brick style, covered by a dome. During this early period, ceramics were raised to a major art form. The finest were the "calligraphy wares" of Nishapur and Samarkand. The star-shaped tomb tower of Qabus (1006) presents a form with far-reaching influence. Both pottery and metalwork were further developed under the Seljuk Turks in the 11th and 12th cent. Luster and "minai" ceramics—using overglaze enamel colors including leaf gilding—both with intricate scenes of court life, were produced at Rayy, Kashan, and elsewhere.

The Mongol and Timurid Periods

The Mongol invasions of the first half of the 13th cent. destroyed many towns and much art. We know little of Persian painting until the so-called Mongol school of the 14th cent. The most famous work of this period is the magnificent Demotte Shah Namah (The History of Kings). The book has been divided up, and many leaves are in American collections. The pictures are large, somber in color, and free and lively in execution, with landscape playing an important role. Small Shah Namahs have simple illustrations in yellow, red, blue, and gold.

Timurid painting of the 15th cent. employs smaller figures and more static compositions. Chinese influences have been integrated and patterned symmetry reemerges. Bihzad, the greatest painter in this style, is renowned for his fine, firm line and exquisite delicacy. The Blue Mosque at Tabriz, named for its brilliant faience casing, is contemporary. Mosaic faience-covered architecture reached its height in 16th-century Isfahan in the great building complex Maidan-i Shah.

The Safavid Dynasty

Under the Safavid dynasty (1499-1722) palaces were decorated with mural paintings, which have been heavily restored. Single-figure portraits and ink drawings were also made for the Safavids. In book illustrations, figures became sinuous, color and pattern ran riot, and, at best, the effect was that of ornate jewelry. A masterpiece of Safavid illumination was the Shah Namah of Shah Tamasp, which incorporates the greatest developments in painting of the early 1520s to the mid-1530s (published in facsimile as The King's Book of Kings, 1972).

Later Developments

In the 17th-century Persian art fell under European and Indian influences and rapidly degenerated. Under the Qajar dynasty (1779-1925) a distinctive, theatrical style was developed in architecture, painting, and the decorative arts. The so-called Neo-Achaemenid style, which characterizes the public buildings of modern Tehran, points to a conscious effort at reviving and integrating the ancient heritage in modern Iran.

Most of these works were produced during two vast, overlapping periods. The Aurignacio-Perigordian (c.14,000-c.13,500 B.C.) includes the powerful Lascaux paintings, the outdoor sculpture at Laussel, and the several small female figurines, known as Venuses, found at several sites. The second period, the Solutreo-Magdalenian (c.14,000-c.9500 B.C.), includes the murals at Rouffignac and Niaux and the ceiling of the cave at Altamira, Spain, the Magdalenian's crowning masterpiece. Both of the great cave complexes were discovered by accident—Altamira in 1879, Lascaux in 1940.

The painting styles, known as Franco-Cantabrian and ascribed to Cro-Magnon man, embrace a variety of techniques, including painting with fingers, sticks, and pads of fur or moss; daubing; dotting; sketching with colored materials and charcoal; and spray painting through hollow bone or by mouth. Several pigments were used, and foreshortening and shadowing were skillfully employed. Images were often crowded close to and on top of each other, sometimes with obvious respect for previously applied paintings. Irregular surfaces were decorated in relief. Separate styles, presumably from different eras, can be discerned, 13 at Lascaux alone.

In most Paleolithic caves animal figures (mainly horses, bison, cattle, and hinds) predominate, suggesting that the art may have had ritual significance related to hunting; there are few group or hunting scenes, however, and human figures are extremely rare. Drawn with vitality and the elegance of great simplicity, the animals are the masterworks of prehistoric art and are of an accuracy that provides invaluable evidence to paleozoologists. The Lascaux cave was closed when the paintings began to deteriorate. Some of Lascaux's painted rooms show no signs of human habitation and may have been used for ritual. Engravings on soft stone, bone, and ivory, as well as low reliefs and a few freestanding sculptures, have been found in or near many of these caves.

In 1994 and 1999 richly decorated limestone caves were discovered at Grotte Chauvet in SE France—again by accident. The stone engravings and more than 400 paintings are the most ancient on record, c.32,000 years old, and depict lions, rhinoceroses, bears, horses, and other creatures with bold realism. In addition, during the late 1990s and early 2000s more than 20 ivory figurines depicting animals and birds and dating from approximately the same period as the Grotte Chauvet paintings, were discovered at various sites in Swabia, SW Germany.

Another style predominates in E Spain and bears a strong resemblance to the rock carvings and paintings of N and S Africa. The pictures, drawn chiefly in silhouette, are found on the walls of shallow rock shelters and are usually small; they depict human as well as animal figures in scenes of hunting, fighting, ceremonial, ritual, and domestic activities. This art seems to have reached its peak in the Mesolithic period. A third style, largely of Aurignacian origin, ranges from France to W Siberia and consists almost entirely of small sculptured figures of animals and human beings. The latter are chiefly female, often abnormally voluptuous, and are generally regarded as fertility goddesses; one of the most famous is the Venus of Willendorf, Austria.

The damp climate of the British Isles is believed to have caused the destruction of most of the islands' Paleolithic art, but some examples have survived. In the first years of the 21st cent. archaeologists discovered the earliest extant works of prehistoric art in Great Britain, engravings of two birds (possibly a crane or swan and a bird of prey) and an ibex, in a cave at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire. They were carved some 12,000 years ago, and are done in a style similar to that of contemporary works on the continent. The engravings are neither as old nor as accomplished as continental examples.

See also African art and Paleolithic period.

Melanesia

Wood carvings and ritual masks, the best studied of Melanesian artifacts, are brilliantly colored. Each object was designed to serve a ritual purpose and thus was not meant to endure for posterity. Particular aspects of Melanesian art had an enormous impact on European artists, including Max Ernst and Constantin Brancusi (Sepik River style), Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore (New Ireland style), during the period from 1915 to 1940.

Among the principal styles familiar in the West are the symmetrical scrollwork carvings and symbolic bark-cloth paintings of the Geelvinck Bay area of Indonesian New Guinea; the carved drums and ritual figures and polychromed pottery of the Sepik River peoples, as well as their wood or basketry masks. Other well-known designs include the carved bird and spiral motifs and superbly decorated canoe prow boards of the Massim area of SE New Guinea and the elegant carved objects with mother-of-pearl inlay characteristic of the Solomon and Admiralty islands.

The Asmat of Indonesian New Guinea are famous for the "praying mantis"-like treatment of the human form. Also famous are their uramon, or soul ships, with elaborate pierced carved prows and their war shields with apotropaic designs. Their objects are spare, smooth, and distinctive. Among their most elegant works are canoes with clean, graceful lines, expansive houses, and sparsely decorated cult objects. The homes of bachelors often have relief carvings of mythological and historic significance, painted in yellow, black, red, and white.

In New Ireland, especially in the north, are found figures and masks made for the dead and heraldic wood sculptures known as Uli figures representing tribal chiefs and which are kept. Malanggan, large horizontal openwork carvings of soft wood, consist of friezes, independent sculptures, and masks. Styles are traditional but the privilege of changing a style can be purchased.

The Baining people of the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain are known for their large masks made of bark cloth stretched over wickerwork frames. After ritual use these masks are destroyed. In New Caledonia carved panels of figures with rhomboid bodies and large flat noses are placed on either side of house doors. In the north masks topped by a ball of hair or plant fibers are worn together with nets covering the body; such masks represent aggressive war spirits or a water deity.

Micronesia

In comparison to Melanesian arts, the objects produced by the Micronesians are streamlined, highly finished, executed with astonishing precision, and coldly functional. The designs developed by these peoples show a highly evolved respect for natural materials, which are scarce. The only masks from Micronesia are from the Mortlock Atoll and represent in simple elongated features benevolent spirits. Rows of figures placed on Mortlock Atoll illustrate mythological events and were thought to protect the islanders from typhoons.

Other important Micronesian art includes objects related to ocean navigation, gable figures in female form from Palau (Belau), and abstract figures representing deities. Micronesian textiles, especially the loom-woven works of the Caroline Islands, are noted for their geometric renderings of humans, stars, and fish. Fibers used are mainly banana and hibiscus.

Polynesia

A great deal of Polynesian art never survived the influx of Western missionaries who mutilated and destroyed any art they considered pornographic or idolatrous. However, these same missionaries also brought back many works to Europe. Among the Polynesian works that remain in museum collections are the characteristic greenish pottery of Fiji, remarkable examples of Hawaiian featherwork, exquisite mats woven in Samoa, wooden and stone ritual sculptures from the smaller islands, and pendants carved in jadeite from New Zealand. These peoples, unlike the Melanesians, intended to create enduring works of art. Artists were limited by strict, formal conventions peculiar to the traditions of their island; nevertheless many produced works that revealed great creative imagination within the stylized form.

The few surviving Hawaiian works attest to a strong tradition of sculptural wood carving without surface decoration. Highly decorative printed bark-cloth thickly figured with geometric patterns is typical of Fiji, and this powerful geometry extended to much of the ornamental carved work throughout W and central Polynesia. The Maori peoples of New Zealand continue to produce virtuoso examples of intricately carved wood sculptures. They create stone amulets known as hei tiki in the forms of embryonic birds and humans with heads bent to one side. They employ spiral motifs in intricate combinations, even in tattooing the human face. After death such tattooed faces are often preserved on their dried skulls as ritual objects. The Maori also make spectacular carved ceremonial canoes and houses. The Maori produce fine textiles with complex woven designs.

The Marquesas Islands have sculptures consisting of large monoliths made of stone, or smaller personal objects of shell, ivory, or wood. Double-headed war clubs used there often take on anthropomorphic form. The Marquesas islanders developed the tattoo into a fine art with which they covered the entire body. On Easter Island an economical woodcarving technique of great precision and beauty developed. The reddish volcanic rock, tufa, was carved to create gargantuan, expressive sculptures of humans weighing as much as 20 tons. Much Polynesian work was feathered, and many of the wooden figures were clothed and decorated.

Characteristic Objects

The material culture of the Eastern Woodlands groups (such as the Cherokee and Iroquois—see Eastern Woodlands culture), for example, included decorated pottery and baskets, quillwork and beadwork, birchbark utensils, plaited sashes, and carved wood ritual masks. Early Woodland cultures, including the Adena and Hopewell, are renowned for their elaborate grave offerings, including copper plates and earspools, objects made of other minerals (e.g. mica, silver, meteoric iron), shell and pearl beads, and ceramic vessels and figurines.

The mainstay of life for the Native Americans of the Great Plains (such as the Arapaho, Blackfoot, Crow, and Sioux) was the buffalo, whose skin, both rawhide and tanned, was used for clothing, containers, tepee covers, and shields. Triangular and quadrangular designs were often painted or embroidered on these items, with beads and porcupine quills. Featherwork, of which the familiar "war bonnet" is a prime example, was lavish. California, Great Basin, and Plateau groups (Pomo, Nez-Percé, Paiute) lived by gathering, hunting, and some fishing. They developed basketry, especially in N and Central California, as a highly refined art. Using a great variety of materials, these groups created many different basketry forms and techniques to make such items as baby carriers, collecting and winnowing baskets, fish weirs, and hats. As cooking and serving containers, the baskets were watertight. They also fashioned ceremonial and "gift" baskets imbued with religious significance. Featherwork was used for headdresses, capes, skirts, and mantles, in dance costumes, and as decoration, together with beads, on baskets.

In the Southwest, Native Americans generally practiced agriculture and lived in settled villages. In that region pottery making, particularly of jars and bowls, is still today a highly developed art with a rich tradition extending back to pre-Columbian times. An art of strong, graphic, geometric design developed for pottery decoration. Southwestern groups cultivated cotton to be spun into yarn, and used a backstrap loom with heddles prior to European contact. The Spaniards brought sheep to the region, which the Navajo adopted for weaving intricately patterned woolen rugs and blankets. Many designs for blankets were adapted from the ritual sandpaintings of the Navajo. The Hopi (see also Pueblo) and Zuni developed brilliantly carved and ornamented kachina dolls to represent living spirits; these are greatly valued by collectors today. After the Spanish conquest, silverworking evolved among the Southwestern Pueblo groups, especially among the Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi, who perfected it to the level of fine art, largely as jewelry.

On the heavily forested Northwest Coast, the Native American groups (Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Salish) developed elaborate woodcarving techniques used to fabricate tools, houses, huge dugout canoes, totem poles, and other heraldic and ritual posts, as well as outstanding masks, bowls, and ladles. Human and animal figures were stylized to abstraction in this work. In addition, they made superb basketry and clothing by twining, and produced metalwork weapons and jewelry. In Arctic regions the skin and fur garments of Eskimo groups were elaborately tailored and occasionally decorated.

Eskimos carved sculptures of Arctic animal life (including seals, walruses, and polar bears) and hunting motifs, using stone, ivory, and bone, and made elaborate ceremonial masks. The subjects of their work were chosen from their extensive mythology as well as their everyday experience.

The Effects of European Contact

It is important to note that prior to European contact, Native American groups did not generally produce art for its own sake. Objects, often utilitarian in function, were adorned with symbolic elements drawn from their daily lives or cosmologies. In other instances minute differences in design motifs on clothing or residential structures served as differentiating mechanisms, rendering the identity of the group immediately apparent to knowledgeable outsiders. Standards of beauty, to the extent that they were considered at all, were based on traditional notions, not on innovation or experimentation away from the cultural norm.

With the coming of European populations and the devastation of Native American cultures, artifacts were avidly sought for museum and private collections. That early collectors attributed great value to often mundane objects almost certainly struck historic Native Americans as odd, so that when the articles were not stolen outright they were usually acquired by buyers at "bargain" rates. This has provoked numerous conflicts in recent years as Native Americans become increasingly vocal in calling for the return of museum items symbolizing their cultural heritage. In recent years the abject poverty of surviving Native American populations, combined with the growing demand for artisans' commodities in industrialized countries, has stimulated the emergence of increasing numbers of North American native artisans. Art has thus become a cottage industry serving tourist markets as well as demand by more discriminating collectors. Among the most sought-after articles are works of jewelry, Eskimo sculpture, as well as the textiles and ceramics of the Southwestern groups.

Major Collections

Museums with major collections of North American native art include the American Museum of Natural History, New York City; Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York City; National Museum of Canada, Ottawa; Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard, Cambridge, Mass.; Provincial Museum, Victoria, British Columbia; Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology, Univ. of California, Berkeley.

A permanent building, boxy and in the International Style, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone was erected in midtown Manhattan in 1939. A new wing designed by Philip Johnson was added in 1964, and the building was renovated and expanded again in 1984 by Cesar Pelli and Associates, principally with the addition of a 52-story residential tower. MoMA Manhattan quarters were subsequently enlarged and redesigned (2002-4) by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi in a highly refined modernist style. Among the museum's new features are a central atrium, skylit and soaring to 110 ft (33.5 m), expanded galleries and office space, an enlarged sculpture garden, and an eight-story education and research building completed in 2006. In preparation for this work the collection was moved to Long Island City in 2002 and housed in a former factory building, dubbed MoMA QNS, that had been reconfigured by the architect Michael Maltzan. The Queens space is now used as a storage and study facility.

Humayun

The school of Mughal painting began in 1549 when Humayun(1530-56) invited two Persian painters to his court, then at Kabul. They came to direct the illustration of the Amir Hamza, a fantastic narrative of which some 1,400 large paintings were executed on cloth.

Achievements under Akbar

In architecture the first great Mughal monument was the mausoleum to Humayun, erected during the reign of Akbar (1556-1605). The tomb, which was built in the 1560s, was designed by a Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas. Set in a garden at Delhi, it has an intricate ground plan with central octagonal chambers, joined by an archway with an elegant facade and surmounted by cupolas, kiosks, and pinnacles. At the same time Akbar was building his fortress-palace in his capital, Agra. Native red sandstone was inlaid with white marble, and all the surfaces were ornately carved on the outside and sumptuously painted inside.

Akbar went on to build the entire city of Fatehpur Sikri (City of Victory) in which extensive use was made of the low arches and bulbous domes that characterize the Mughal style. Built in 1571 the choice of the site of Sikri reflected Akbar's gratitude to a Muslim saint at Sikri for the birth of his son. Courtiers soon followed suit and built homes surrounding the palace and mosque. The new city became the capital of the empire, but in 1585 it was abandoned.

Under Akbar, Persian artists directed an academy of local painters. The drawings, costumes, and ornamentation of illuminated manuscripts by the end of the 16th cent. illustrate the influence of Indian tastes and manners in the bright coloring and detailed landscape backgrounds. Modeling and perspective also began to be adapted from Western pictures. Basawan, Lal, and Daswanth were Akbar's most famous painters.

Jahangir

Jahangir (1605-27) favored paintings of events from his own life rather than illustrated fiction. He encouraged portraiture and scientific studies of birds, flowers, and animals, which were collected in albums. Mansur and Manohar were among his famous painters. Jahangir, who resided at Lahore, built less than his predecessors but effected the significant change from sandstone to marble.

Shah Jahan

It was Shah Jahan (1628-58) who perfected Mughal architecture and erected at Agra its most noble and famous building, the tomb of his favorite wife, which is known as the Taj Mahal. A huge white marble building of simple, symmetrical plan, it is inlaid with colorful semiprecious materials and is set in an equally beautiful and symmetrical garden. The Taj Mahal continues the tradition of Mughal garden tombs, of which Humayun's tomb was the first. Shah Jahan established (1638) Delhi as his capital and built there the famous Red Fort, which contained the imperial Mughal palace. Painting also flourished during Shah Jahan's reign. Portraiture was most highly developed at his sophisticated court, and ink drawings were of high quality.

Decline under Aurangzeb

Under the orthodox Aurangzeb (1659-1707) the decline of the arts began, although his ornate Pearl Mosque (1662) at Delhi is worthy of mention. During his reign the Mughal academy was dispersed. Many artists then joined Rajput courts, where their influence on Hindu painting is clearly evident.

See Indian art and architecture.

The Colonial Period

Folk arts, including the weaving of magnificent textiles, pottery making, and silver work have flourished in Mexico throughout its history, but with the coming of the Spanish to Mexico the native peoples were introduced to European art, especially painting, and building techniques. A good many Spanish paintings were brought there, and during the 17th cent. gifted native artists became adept at religious oil painting, modeling religious figures in wax, and the art of polychrome wood sculpture (see Spanish colonial art and architecture).

The serenity and sensitivity of the early native art combined with the Spanish influence to give to Mexican painting a mellowness and richness of color not yet achieved in Spain at that time. Fifty years or so before Murillo made his mark as a colorist, Mexican artists were already giving their works rich red and blue tones. This type of work is sometimes referred to as Mexican baroque to distinguish it from the more rigid European baroque.

Baltásar de Echave the elder (c.1548-1620) is considered to be the first great Mexican artist; he founded the first native school in 1609. His Agony in the Garden (begun 1582) is an example of a Renaissance work with a Spanish character. More important, however, was the work of Alonso Vázquez (c.1565-1608). Painting declined toward the middle of the 17th cent., and sculpture and architecture gained ascendancy; the dominant style in both was the Churrigueresque (named after José Churriguera), a fanciful form of the baroque, but Mexican plateresque art and architecture also appeared. The 18th cent. produced a large number of artists; outstanding among them were José Ibarra and Miguel Cabrera. A period of academic art followed, producing no very distinctive works; this period of imitation was broken at the close of the 19th cent. by the painter José María Velasco, whose landscapes again reaffirmed a national style.

Independence, Empire, and Revolution

Toward the end of the 19th cent. the political broadside became a popular and pungent native art. José Guadalupe Posada was famous for his satirical prints. With the coming of independence, architecture went into a general decline, but wealthy creoles were responsible for the erection of a profusion of luxurious mansions, some of them of great beauty.

In the latter half of the 19th cent., during the ill-starred regime (1864-67) of Emperor Maximilian, the heavy splendor of French Second Empire architecture was imported into Mexico. The famous gardens and castle at Chapultepec were beautified by the emperor and made even more lavish by the dictator Porfirio Díaz, under whose administration (1876-1911) the French accent became stronger, especially in the mansions along the famous Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. The influence of art nouveau is evident in the portentous and elaborately decorated Palacio de Bellas Artes, also commissioned by Díaz but not completed until 1930.

After the revolution of 1910 Mexican artists enjoyed unusually strong government patronage and were, as a result, committed principally to the expression of revolutionary ideals. The foremost were muralists employing broad techniques in the service of their political and social themes. The three internationally acclaimed painters Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros produced masterpieces of mural art and initiated a revival of fresco painting. Miguel Covarrubias attained international fame as a caricaturist and illustrator, and Dr. Atl (pseud. of Gerardo Murillo) was influential as a teacher and art critic as well as a painter. Francisco Goita was noted for his paintings stressing the hardships of Native American peasant existence.

Later Mexican Art and Architecture

Modern Mexican painters and sculptors continued to produce an extraordinary variety of works in many styles and techniques. Major figures included José Luis Cuevas, Jorge G. Camarena, Martínez de Hoyos, Frida Kahlo (Diego Rivera's wife), Enrique Echeverría, Leonora Carrington, Francisco Toledo, and Rodolfo Morales. Rufino Tamayo and Gunther Gerzo were outstanding figures in 20th-century abstract and semi-abstract easel painting.

Modern architecture has also flourished. Functionalism, expressionism, and other schools have left their imprint on a large number of works in which Mexican stylistic elements have been combined with European and North American techniques. In the great manufacturing center of Monterrey there are fine examples of industrial architecture. Perhaps the most outstanding achievement of contemporary Mexican architecture is the Ciudad Universitaria outside Mexico City, a complex of buildings and grounds housing the National Autonomous Univ. of Mexico. A cooperative venture, the project was directed by Carlos Lazo. A major structure is the central library, with a brilliant mosaic facade by the architect and painter Juan O'Gorman. Another architect of note is Felix Candela, who designed the expressionistic church Nuestra Señora de los Milagros.

See also National Museum of Anthropology.

Early Works

The earliest art of Japan, probably dating from the 3d and 2d millennia B.C., consisted of monochrome pottery with cord-impressed designs (Jomon), also the name for the early period of Japanese art. Later Jomon (1000-300 B.C.) finds include bone earrings, blades of ivory and horn, lacquer objects, and small clay figurines. The subsequent period of the Yayoi (300 B.C.-A.D. 300) produced wheel-thrown pots and large ritual bronze bells known as dotaku. The Kofun period produced simply modeled clay figures of animals, people, houses, and boats known as haniwa, which were placed around tomb mounds.

Buddhist and Chinese Influences

The stylistic tradition of Japanese art was firmly established at the time of the introduction of Buddhism in the 6th cent. The teaching of the arts through the medium of Buddhist monasteries and temples progressed under Korean monks and artisans, who created Buddhist sculpture and pictures representing divinities, saints, and legendary figures. The close relationship between Chinese and central Asian culture is reflected in the objects preserved in the Shosoin depository at Nara. Throughout its history Japanese art has relied heavily on forms and techniques borrowed from China. Rare examples of wall paintings in the golden hall at Horyu-ji, near Nara (early 8th cent.) were based on Chinese Horyoji sculpture based on Korean models, reflecting the T'ang style of painting.

The Nara Period

In the sculpture of the Nara period (710-784) clay figures and statues made in the dry-lacquer process (lacquer applied to a solid core of wood or lacquered cloths placed over some kind of armature) attained great popularity. Representations of Buddhist deities and saints in wood and bronze evolved in style from an elegant thinness in the works of Tori (active c.600-630) to the more massive figures of the 8th and 9th cent., which reflect the style of the later T'ang dynasty in China.

During the Nara period the traditional technical methods of Japanese painting were established. The work was executed upon thin or gauzelike silk or soft paper with Chinese ink and watercolors. It was then mounted on silk brocade or its paper imitation and rolled upon a rod when not in view. The hanging scroll is called kakemono. The long, narrow horizontal scroll (emakimono), unrolled in the hands, usually illustrates a narrative with progressive scenes.

The Fujiwara Period

The Fujiwara period (898-1185) is marked by the crystallization of the Yamato-e tradition of painting (based on national rather than on Chinese taste). Kanaoka (late 9th cent.) was the first major native painter. The famous illustrated scroll of the Tale of the Genji—written in the early llth cent. by Lady Murasaki—with its rich color and subtracted treatment of the features of men and women reflects the extreme sensitivity and refinement of the court during that period. The same delicacy of taste can be seen in the sculpture of Jocho (11th cent.).

The Kamakura Period

In the Kamakura period (late 12th-14th cent.) the country was governed by the military, which preferred boldness to refinement, action to contemplative atmosphere, and realism to formality. The new class created a demand for paintings and sculptures portraying officials, warriors, priests, and poets. The school of the sculptor Jocho was continued by Kokei, Kaikei, and Unkei, the principal Kamakura sculptor. These artists imbued their works with a vigor and attention to realistic detail that was never equaled.

Takanobu and his son Nobuzane were the most esteemed portrait painters of the age. Most of the fine emakimono that survive today are from the Kamakura period. These scrolls are often executed in continuous narrative form, often with accompanying text, with the same figures appearing many times against a unified background. This method of representation was used with utmost skill and imagination in superb scrolls such as the Tales of the Heiji Insurrection (13th cent., Mus. of Fine Arts, Boston). In this art form the affairs of people construe the main focus of the format, whether the subject is religious (Shigisan-engi) or secular (Tales of Ise).

The Muromachi Period

The Muromachi period (1392-1573) ushered in a renaissance of Chinese-style ink painting. The Zen sect of Buddhism, which enjoyed a growing popularity in the early Kamakura period, received the continued support of the new rulers. Ink painting was accepted as a means of teaching Zen doctrine. Such priest-painters as Josetsu, Shubun, and Sesshu are the most revered of Japanese landscapists. Their works are characterized by economy of execution, forceful brushstrokes, and asymmetrical composition, with emphasis on unfilled space. During this period sculpture began to lose its Buddhist inspiration.

The Momoyama Period

Architectural sculpture was on a par with the unprecedented grandeur and ostentation achieved in painted screens of the Momoyama period (1568-1615). At this time constant warfare created a need for many great fortresses. Their interiors were lavishly decorated with screens painted in strong, thick colors against a gold background. The Kano family of artists succeeded in fusing the technique of Chinese ink painting with the decorative quality of Japanese art.

The Edo Period to the Twentieth Century

The school of painting started in the Edo period (1615-1867) by Koetsu Hon'ami and Sotatsu Tawaraya and continued by Ogata Korin and Ogata Kenzan represented a return to the native tradition of Japanese painting. The Deer Scroll (early 17th cent.; Seattle Art Mus.) by Koetsu and Sotatsu exemplifies the happy union of literature, calligraphy, and painting. A great demand for miniature sculptures in the form of ornamental buttons (netsuke) arose at this time, and great masterpieces of carving were produced. Dutch engraving found its way to Japan in this period and influenced such painters as Okyo Maruyama, the leader of the naturalist school, who created pictures with Western perspective.

There arose a new type of art in the form of wood-block prints known as ukiyo-e (pictures of the fleeting floating world), which appealed first to the taste of the lowest, but wealthiest, groups of feudal society. The color-print designers eventually won worldwide recognition and influenced Degas, Whistler, and numerous other Western artists. Among the major ukiyo-e painters are Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige.

Recent Japanese Art

In the mid-19th cent. a few print designers attained distinction, but no masters appeared to equal their predecessors. In the 20th cent. the majority of painters and sculptors have been overwhelmingly influenced by Western styles. Contemporary Japanese painters such as Taikan Yokoyama and Kiyoteru Kuroda have received international acclaim. In lacquerware, ceramics, and textiles traditional forms have been retained, and modern Japanese pottery is widely esteemed.

For a discussion of early works in the area see Etruscan art and Roman art. See also Italian architecture.

The Medieval Period

Throughout the Middle Ages, Italian art consisted primarily of architectural decorations (frescoes and mosaics). Byzantine art (see Byzantine art and architecture) in Italy was a highly formal and refined decoration with a standardized calligraphy and an admirable use of color and gold. Until the 13th cent., art in Italy was almost entirely regional, affected by external European and Eastern currents. After c.1250 the art of the various regions developed characteristics in common, so that a certain unity as well as great originality is observable.

The Beginnings of Italian Renaissance Art

Major painters, including Guido of Siena, Cimabue, and Duccio di Buoninsegna, while retaining many of the Byzantine conventions, introduced a new naturalism and a more direct appeal to human emotion. The same spirit is seen in the powerful sculpture of Nicola Pisano. He made use of elements from classical antiquity, as did Pietro Cavallini in his fresco paintings in Rome.

But it is with Giotto di Bondone, a contemporary of Dante, that the new painting first takes on life and warmth. His style, perfected c.1300, determined the future course of art in Italy. His immediate followers, Taddeo Gaddi, Bernardo Daddi, Giottino, and others spread his teachings and technique. Simultaneously, art flourished in 14th-century Siena, following the example set by Duccio and developing a more Gothic manner. Among the superb artists of the Sienese school were the painters Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the sculptors Giovanni Pisano and Arnolfo di Cambio.

The Black Death (1348) severely curtailed artistic productivity for the next two generations. Apocalyptic frescoes were created during this time by Andrea Orcagna in Florence and by Francesco Traini in Pisa. The pessimistic content of this art was superseded in the early 15th cent. by an elegant manner known as the International style (see Gothic architecture and art), manifest in the works of Lorenzo Monaco, Gentile da Fabriano, Masolino da Panicale, and to a certain extent Pisanello.

The Quattrocento

In the second decade of the 15th cent. Italy—primarily Florence—took the lead in the formation of an art that was to affect Europe profoundly for more than 500 years (see Renaissance art and architecture). Political stability was established in several regions, and powerful ruling families produced the patrons of art that made the artistic flowering possible. Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Alberti were among the first to look consciously toward classical antiquity as a model for their work. They, with Masaccio, whose style recalls Giotto's monumentality, began to devise the optical system of perspective. They also set a high artistic standard that was emulated by succeeding generations.

In the first half of the 15th cent. the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti embellished the Florentine baptistery with his splendid bronze doors, winning the commission in competition against another great sculptor and architect, Filippo Brunelleschi. Other sculptors, such as Desiderio da Settignano, Antonio Rossellino, and Bertoldo di Giovanni, carried the tradition established by Donatello through to Michelangelo, while the workshop of the Della Robbias during the 15th cent. produced a great quantity of superb terra-cotta relief sculptures. The Tuscan painters, including Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, created works of exquisite color. Paolo Uccello and Andrea del Castagno contributed refinements to the understanding of the laws of perspective.

Domenico Veneziano and Piero della Francesca were attracted to Florence, while Florentine artists such as Donatello and Fra Filippo Lippi ventured into N Italy. By the second half of the quattrocento, schools in N Italy began to flourish. Squarcione was the teacher of many painters, among them Carlo Crivelli and the powerful master Andrea Mantegna, who painted magnificent frescoes for churches and palaces in Padua and Mantua. His father-in-law, Jacopo Bellini, a superb draftsman, had two sons, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, who continued his Venetian workshop. Gentile painted detailed and delightful scenes of Venice, as did Carpaccio. Giovanni Bellini initiated a century of Venetian greatness with the richness of color for which Venice became famous.

The Vivarini family produced paintings notable for a bright, translucent color. Antonello da Messina, a Sicilian who was briefly in Venice, was one of the first Italians to use the medium of oil painting, with remarkable effect. The impact of Mantegna's style was felt in Ferrara in the paintings of Cosimo Tura, Francesco del Cossa, and Ercole de' Roberti. In Siena during the 15th cent. the major artists included Sassetta, Giovanni di Paolo, Francesco di Giorgio, and the sculptor Vecchietta.

The last half of the quattrocento in Florence saw the rise of a group of painters celebrated for their lyrical style—Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Baldovinetti—as well as the more austere masters Signorelli and Antonio Pollaiuolo. Perugino and particularly Melozzo da Forlì were among the notable painters of Umbria. Benozzo Gozzoli and Ghirlandaio decorated Florence with exquisite narrative frescoes. The Florentine sculptor Verrocchio infused his works with a fresh vitality and sense of drama. But in the years around the turn of the 16th cent. the works of these artists were reduced in significance as the figures of the High Renaissance emerged.

Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael vied with one another in Florence and in Rome to create a perfect art. Raphael's idealized Madonnas and portraits and his Vatican frescoes exerted a tremendous influence over European artists. Whereas his works have come down to us fully realized, many of the complete artistic schemes of Michelangelo and Leonardo remain largely on paper.

Leonardo has left only a small group of magnificent easel paintings and one grand but deteriorated fresco, The Last Supper in Milan. His unparalleled, incredibly versatile genius is most clearly revealed in his notebooks, replete with extraordinary plans of all varieties. Michelangelo's magnificent ceiling and Last Judgment for the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican are the only monumental projects in painting, sculpture, or architecture that materialized according to his plans. Most of his sculptural masterpieces are fragments of vast designs that were never executed in their entirety.

In the early 16th cent. some of the grandeur of the High Renaissance artists was echoed in the works of Andrea del Sarto, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Fra Bartolommeo, but other followers of the great masters in Rome, in Florence, and elsewhere developed a complex, sometimes bizarre style in their own right known as mannerism. Among these were the painters Pontormo, Giulio Romano, Parmigianino, Il Rosso, Primaticcio, and later Bronzino and Vasari, as well as the sculptors Giovanni Bologna, Bandinelli, Ammanati, Buontalenti, and Benvenuto Cellini. By the second half of the 16th cent. the mannerist style had declined into a rather dry academism, seen in the works of the Zuccari family.

Venetian Painting

Venice was comparatively unaffected by the elegant, tortuous forms of mannerism. At the beginning of the 16th cent. two superlative Venetian masters, the mysterious, short-lived Giorgione and the long-lived, prolific Titian, continued the tradition established by Giovanni Bellini of sumptuous, poetic coloring. They created sensuous figures whose contours melted into luminous, atmospheric landscapes. Their stylistic effects influenced the works of Palma Vecchio, Pordenone, the Bassano family, the Ferrarese Dosso Dossi, and the lavish banquet scenes of Paolo Veronese. Only Tintoretto veered away from the harmonious canvases that were typical of the Venetians. He created instead twisted, dramatic, elongated forms, related to those of the mannerists but more vigorously conceived.

The Baroque Period

In the early 17th cent. Rome became the center of a renewal of Italian dominance in the arts. In Parma, Correggio decorated church vaults with lively figures floating softly on clouds—a scheme that was to have a profound influence on baroque ceiling paintings. The stormy chiaroscuro paintings of Caravaggio and the robust, illusionistic paintings of the Bolognese Carracci family gave rise to the baroque period in Italian art. Domenichino, Francesco Albani, and later Andrea Sacchi were among those who carried out the classical implications in the art of the Carracci.

On the other hand, Guido Reni, Guercino, Gentileschi, Lanfranco, and later Pietro da Cortona and Padre Pozzo, while thoroughly trained in a classical-allegorical mode, were at first inclined to paint dynamic compositions full of gesticulating figures in a manner closer to that of Caravaggio. The towering virtuoso of baroque exuberance and grandeur in sculpture and architecture was Bernini. Toward 1640 many of the painters leaned toward the classical style that had been brought to the fore in Rome by the French expatriate Nicolas Poussin. The sculptors Alessandro Algardi and the Fleming François Duquenoy also tended toward the classical. Notable late baroque artists include the Genoese Gaulli and the Neapolitans Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena.

The Rococo Period

The leading lights of the 18th cent. came from Venice. Among them were the brilliant exponent of the rococo style, Tiepolo; the architectural painters Guardi, Canaletto, Piazzetta, and Bellotto; and the engraver of Roman antiquities, Piranesi. Fantastic landscape was brought into vogue in the works of Castiglione and Magnasco, both of whom worked in Naples.

Modern Italian Art

During the late 18th and 19th cent. Italy continued to serve as a training school for the artists of the world but tended to rest on her laurels. In the mid-19th cent. the group known as the Macchiaioli gave new life to landscape and genre subjects. Early in the 20th cent. the exponents of futurism developed a dynamic vision of the modern world while Chirico expressed a strange metaphysical quietude and Modigliani joined the school of Paris. Gifted later modern artists include the sculptors Giacomo Manzù, Marino Marini, the still-life painter Giorgio Morandi, and the iconoclastic painter Lucio Fontana. In the second half of the 20th cent. Italian designers, particularly those of Milan, have profoundly influenced international styles with their imaginative and ingenious functional works.

Background

In the century after the death (A.D. 632) of the prophet Muhammad, his Arab followers spread his teachings through Egypt and N Africa, as far west as Spain, and as far east as Sassanid Persia. Because of their rapid expansion and the paucity of the earlier artistic heritage of the Arabian Peninsula, the Muslims derived their unique style from synthesizing the arts of the Byzantines, the Copts, the Romans, and the Sassanids. The great strength of Islamic art as a whole lies in its ability to synthesize native design elements with imported ones.

Abstract decoration of the surface is an important factor in every work of Islamic art and architecture, whether large or small. Curving and often interlaced lines, of which the arabesque is a typical example, and the use of brilliant colors characterize almost all of the finest productions, which are of greatly varied styles. Islamic art eschews the realistic representation of human beings and animals, and its floral designs are extremely distant from their original models. While the prohibition against depicting living forms is not contained in the Qur'an, it is widely thought that the non-representational character of Islamic ornament has its source in the traditional theological prohibition against imitating God's works.

Architecture

The earliest architectural monument of Islam that retains most of its original form is the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhrah) in Jerusalem, constructed in 691-92 on the site of the Jewish Second Temple. Muslims believe it to be the spot from which Muhammad ascended to heaven. It has mosaics depicting scrolling vines and flowers, jewels, and crowns in greens, blues, and gold. Similar in some aspects is the later Great Mosque of Damascus (built c.705-14) which was built by Al Walid over what was originally a Roman temple. The interior walls have stone mosaics that depict crowns, fantastic plants, realistic trees, and even empty towns. This is thought to represent Paradise for the faithful Muslim. Both the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the great Mosque of Damascus used the Syrian cut-stone technique of building and popularized the use of the dome (see mosque).

The 8th-century desert palace Khirbat al-Mafjar (in present-day Jordan) reveals a wealth of carved and molded stucco decoration, sculptured stone reliefs, and figural fresco paintings. In 750 the Abbasid dynasty moved the capital east to Baghdad, and from 836 to 892 the Abbasid rulers resided at Samarra. The Great Mosque of Samarra is an important example of the Iraqi hypostyle, noted for its massive size and spectacular minaret. In Iran few Islamic buildings erected before the 10th cent. are still standing. Sassanid building techniques, such as the squinch, were combined with the mosque form (see Persian art and architecture). Sassanid influence is also strong in many Umayyad dynasty residential palaces, built mostly in Syria. The most famous is the 8th-century palace of Mshatta; much of its delicately carved stone facade is now in Berlin.

In the middle of the 8th cent. the last of the Umayyads escaped to Spain and refounded his dynasty there. The great Mosque of Córdoba was begun in 785 and is famous for its rows of double-tiered arches. The mosque was extended three times. The culture of Islamic Spain reached its apogee in Moorish art and architecture. Faïence and lacy pierced-stone screens are the hallmarks of its decoration. The same style prevails in N Africa and is seen at its best in Fès, Morocco, where much elaborately carved wood is used. The Mudé jarstyle of Spain, employed throughout the 18th cent. and influential until much later, is based on this architecture.

Late in the 9th cent. the governor of Egypt, Ibn Tulun, initiated the high period of Egypto-Islamic art with the building of his famous mosque in Cairo. In the 10th cent. the Fatimids introduced into Egypt the decorative stalactite ceiling from Iran and placed emphasis on decorative flat moldings. The most important Fatimid buildings are the Cairo mosques of al-Azhar and al-Aqmar. The cruciform Mosque of Hasanin Cairo, built by a Mamluk sultan in 1536, still reflects Persian influence.

In India a distinct style, preserved mainly in architecture, developed after the Delhi Sultanate was established (1192). This art made extensive use of stone and reflected Indian adaptation to Islam rule, until Mughal art replaced it in the 17th cent. (see Mughal art and architecture). The square Char Minar of Hyderabad (1591) with large arches, arcades, and minarets is typical.

In Turkey the mosque form was also derived from Persia, as was most Turkish art. The great Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia, adapted for use as a mosque, greatly influenced Turkish architects. The most famous among these is Sinan, chief architect in the Ottoman court from 1539 until his death in 1588. He constructed or designed most of Sulayman I's buildings, the most noted of which is his mosque (c.1557) in Istanbul, where he is buried. It has four minarets and stained-glass windows flanking the mihrab. The mosque (1614) of Sultan Ahmed I is similarly distinguished by its dome lit by numerous windows, and wall surfaces covered with green and blue tiles. Fine ornate buildings were erected in Turkey until the middle of the 17th cent.

The Decorative Arts

Among the ceramic types are unglazed wares, molded pieces with the lead glaze of Hellenistic tradition, and most famous, the lusterware fragments. In 9th-century Islam the technique of tin-glazed ware was perfected. Lusterware was imported into Egypt and later made there. The Great Mosque of Al Qayrawan (c.862) is decorated with square luster tiles set in a lozenge pattern around the pierced marble prayer niche. The 9th cent. also saw the development of metalwork in a distinctive and powerful style under the Umayyads in Egypt. Skilled craftsmanship can be seen in rock-crystal carving, a continuation of Sassanid art, using floral motifs that became increasingly abstract.

From the 10th to the mid-13th cent. great strides were made in the arts; Egypt became a center of these arts and of calligraphy, which was of prime importance all over the Islamic world. Arabic script represents the expression of the will and strength of Allah, and as such is regarded as sacred by the faithful. One of Islam's most renowned calligraphers was Ibn Muqlah (d. 940) of Baghdad who invented the six most prominent cursive scripts. Certain scripts were favored for specific uses, such as Kufic for copying the Qur'an. The Kufic script, often executed in gold on parchment, was further animated by floral interlaces. Calligraphy was not used exclusively for two-dimensional works but also appears in architectural ornament, ceramics, textiles and metalwork. During this period calligraphy, bookbinding, papermaking, and illumination were developed and were held in highest esteem throughout Islam. The sloping cursive script most commonly used today, Nastaliq, was perfected in the 15th cent.

Before the 13th cent. rugs, silks, linens, and brocades were produced throughout the Islamic world, but only fragments remain; the same is true of delicate and highly refined carvings in wood and ivory. Early in the 13th cent. a school of secular manuscript painting arose in the Baghdad area. The pictures may be divided into two types: those that illustrate scientific works, descending directly from late Hellenistic models, and those that illustrate anecdotal tales and whose miniatures display lively detail.

In the middle of the 13th cent. the Mongol invasions devastated Iran and deeply scarred all Islam as far west as the Mediterranean Sea. However, after a period of acclimatization, the Chinese taste and artifacts imported by the Mongols revitalized the art of Iran, where book illustration reached great heights. With the arrival of the Seljuks in Iran came a new ceramic technique, fritware, similar to certain Chinese porcelains. The unique qualities of this ware enabled artists to create richly colored glazes such as deep blues from cobalt and turquoise from copper. Syria and Iraq continued to manufacture fine black-and-turquoise pottery. Textiles and rugs of great beauty were again manufactured throughout Islam, and in the 15th cent. Mamluk carpets were renowned for their designs of great complexity and their asymmetrical knots. Turkish ceramics reached their peak in the "Iznik" ware of the 16th and 17th cent. Distinctive green tiles are frequently used in the decoration of Turkish architecture.

Introduction

Although a great deal of Indian secular art was produced, it was essentially made of perishable material and has not survived. What has survived in the medium of stone is religious art. In both Buddhist and Hindu art, symbolism in gesture, posture, and attribute contains many levels of meaning. In images of the Buddha, different hand positions (mudras) signify religious states, such as the Enlightenment (Nirvana), Meditation, and Preaching. In Hindu sculpture, deities (see Vishnu, Krishna, and Shiva) are frequently represented with many hands to indicate their power to perform multiple deeds at the same time, and the hands each carry their characteristic attributes. With the exception of Mughal art and architecture, which demands separate treatment, the major trends in Indian art-Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain-are discussed within this article.

Indus Valley Civilization

The earliest Indian art emerged from the valley of the Indus River during the second half of the 3d millennium B.C. The best-known sites are Harappa, destroyed in the 19th cent., and Mohenjo-Daro; these are among the earliest examples of civic planning. Houses, markets, storage facilities, offices, and public baths were arranged in a gridlike scheme. There was also a highly developed drainage system.

The Indus civilization produced many statuettes made of steatite and limestone. Some statuettes resemble the hieratic style of contemporary Mesopotamia, while others are done in the smooth, sinuous style that is the prototype of later Indian sculpture, in which the plastic modeling reveals the animating breath of life (prana). Also found in this region are square steatite seals adorned with a range of animals, including naturalistically rendered bulls; ceramic storage jars with simple, stylized designs; toys with wheels; and figurines, which may be mother goddesses. Bronze weapons, tools, and sculptures indicate a sophistication in craftsmanship rather than a major aesthetic development.

Post-Indus Civilization through the Maurya Dynasty

Of the period from the end of the Indus civilization (c.1500 B.C.) until Alexander the Great crossed (325 B.C.) the Indus, few traces remain. However, the principles of Indian architecture were developed in wooden buildings, long since disintegrated.

From the great Maurya dynasty the most famous remains are the edict pillars, erected throughout N India by the Emperor Asoka to proclaim his devotion to Buddhism. The monolithic, smooth columns are over 50 ft (15 m) high and are surmounted by lotus capitals and animal figures. Some of the pillar capitals reveal forms that suggest Persepolitan influences. Also dating from the reign of Asoka is the earliest stone ogival chaitya window, found on the portal of a small rock-cut sanctuary near Bodh Gaya. The chaitya halls were monastic sanctuaries hewn out of rock. As they evolved, from the 3d cent. B.C. through the 1st millennium A.D., they became elaborate colonnaded halls, or walls embellished with painting or sculpture.

Sunga and Andhra Dynasties

The earliest extant stupas date from the Sunga dynasty (2d-1st cent. B.C.) and early Andhra dynasty (1st cent. B.C.). These relic mounds are surrounded by railings and gateways covered with carved ornament. One of the main stupas is at Bharhut, where the sculpture is archaic in character. Relief medallions of the Buddha's life or of the jatakas (tales of his previous lives) are shallow cut, with all the incidents of each story arranged within a single composition. The bodies of semidivine beings including yakshis (female tree spirits) are flattened against the pillar of which they form part; prana is still emphasized.

The important stupa at Sanchi shows a similar style. Important carvings on the gateways of another stupa at Sanchi date from the early Andhra period. The yakshis have acquired full, graceful forms, and high-relief compositions are frequently conceived in a continuous method of narration. The carved railing from Bodh Gaya, the place of the Buddha's enlightenment, and the earliest surviving wall paintings are also early Andhra; paintings in the rock-cut cave at Ajanta narrate the Buddha's birth as an elephant and the entire synopsis of historic life. In the far south, in the Deccan, the later Andhra dynasty continued to flourish into the 1st cent. A.D. Its greatest monument is the carving at the Great Stupa at Amaravati, c.A.D. 200. The complex but coherent composition, the chiaroscuro, and the liveliness of the crowded surfaces distinguish these bas-reliefs.

Gandhara and Mathura

Under the Kushans, conquerors from central Asia, two of India's most important styles were developed between the 2d and 5th cent. A.D.: Gandhara art and art of Mathura. Gandhara art, named after the region of Gandhara now in Pakistan, presents some of the earliest images of the Buddha. Earlier at Bharhut and Sanchi, the Buddha's presence was represented by symbols, such as the pipal tree, the wheel of life, footprints, and an empty throne. The Gandhara style was profoundly influenced by 2d-century Hellenistic art and was itself highly influential in central and eastern Asia. Ivories and imported glass and lacquerware attest to the cosmopolitan tastes and extensive trade that characterized the period. Stupas and monasteries were adorned with relief friezes, often carved in dark schist, showing figures in classical poses with flowing Hellenistic draperies.

Farther east and south, contemporary Mathura, also under Kushan rule, created a wholly Indian sculptural art. Reddish limestone was the usual medium. More sensuous, heavier Buddhas whose limbs are created according to canonical instructions, smile directly at their worshipers. Reliefs of the yakshis carved against railing pillars are more frankly sensual and erotic than those at Sanchi. Buddhist iconography was developed in Gandhara. Mathura, however, preserved and developed Indian forms for three centuries.

The Gupta Period

Buddhist art flourished during this period, which has often been described as a golden age. A famous rock-cut monastery at Ajanta consists of several chaitya halls and numerous residential viharas. Both facades and interiors contain elegant relief sculpture, while interiors are covered with painted murals that feature superb figures drawn with a gracefully sinuous line. As in all periods, there is little difference in the images of the major Indian religions, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain. Large stone figures, stone and terra-cotta reliefs, and large and small bronzes are made in the refined Gupta style; the level of production is uniformly high. After the 7th cent., although the rulers of the Pala and Sena dynasties (730-1197) were Hindu, significant Buddhist art was created. Images in bronze and in hard black stone from Nalanda and elsewhere reveal a development of the Gupta manner, with extensive attention to ornamental details.

Architecture and Sculpture of the Hindu Dynasties

From the 6th cent. on, with the resurgence of Hindu dynasties throughout India, a characteristic temple plan was developed. An entrance portico led to a pillared hall (mandapa) into the cella. The shrine was often crowned by a large tower known as the shikhara. In S India the Dravida tower rose in a series of terraces, each symbolizing a different divinity; in the north, nagara spires ascended in a massive conical shape.

Innumerable temples were built that were so exuberantly embellished with sculpture that their style is called "sculptural architecture." The Khajuraho temples in central India (c.1000) represent one of the high points of the nagara buildings, and the damaged Temple of the Sun at Konarak (c.1250) reveals, in its famous erotic sculptures, carvings that combine balanced mass with delicate execution. The Jain temples at Mt. Abu, constructed entirely of imported white marble and dating from the 10th and 13th cent., have plain exteriors but are ornately carved inside.

In S India the 7th-century Pallava dynasty introduced the dravida style temple in a number of pyramidal raths (temples) at Mahabalipuram; an enormous cliff-face at the site is carved with a life-size representation of gods, men, and beasts, including the elephant family. The dravida style plan was used also in the 8th cent. in the quarried temple at Ellora. The Chola dynasty of S India further developed this form in the 11th cent., when they probably also cast most of large numbers of S Indian bronzes, of which the Nataraja (dancing Shiva) images are perhaps the best known.

The dravida style culminated in a series of expanded "temple townships," of which the largest is Srirangam, consisting of seven concentric enclosures. These ended in the comparatively crude stucco sculptured architecture of 17th-century Mandura. Medieval bronze sculpture was highly developed in S India. The chief subjects were the deities, figures of whom were used for processional and home ritual. Skilled cire-perdue sculptures were produced until the late 19th cent. in many regions of India.

Indian Painting

Adverse climate and other conditions have injured what wall painting existed. The most famous surviving Buddhist paintings are from the caves at Ajanta. Little is known of Hindu wall painting except for fragments at Ellora and Tanjore (see Thanjavur). The earliest Indian manuscript paintings are Buddhist, of the Pala dynasty; they have a delicate color. The 13th- to 15th-century Jain manuscript illuminations, painted in vivid red, blue, and gold, are most easily recognized by the characteristic protruding farther eye. Rajput miniature painting, which was practiced in N India from the 16th through the 19th cent., is related both to Mughal painting and to earlier Indian styles. It illustrates a variety of Hindu subjects: the ragamala series (musical modes), the legendary epics and romances, and particularly Krishna's deeds. Rajput painting is characterized by lyrical landscapes, sinuous grace in the depiction of the human form, and an interest in perspective.

The Modern Era

Little of the glorious tradition of Indian artistic achievement survived British rule. Indian artists adapted Western techniques and produced gouache paintings to suit the tastes of European buyers. Patua scrolls, containing swiftly executed watercolor illustrations of many subjects, became one source for the revival of Indian themes during the 20th cent. A growing nationalist sentiment pervaded Indian art in the early decades of the 20th cent. along with the conscious assimilation of Western styles. Major modern artists include Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Jamini Roy, Amrita Sher Gil, N. S. Bendre, M. B. Samant, Francis Souza, Bhagwan Kapoor, M. F. Husain, Bhupen Khakhar, Ram Kinker, Dhanraj Bhagat, Amar Nath Seghal, Chintamoni Kar, and Amina Ahmad.

Background

The Hittite invaders of central Anatolia (the area that is present-day W Turkey) came from the east c.2000 B.C. and by 1400 B.C. were masters of all of Asia Minor. Their most important period of artistic activity lasted from 1450 to 1200 B.C. The art of the Hittite Empire merged stylistically with Syrian art gradually, beginning in the 11th cent. B.C. The modern interest in Hittite culture was aroused in the mid-19th cent. by the Rev. Archibald Henry Sayre of Oxford, England.

Art of the Hittite Empire

Hittite art drew upon far earlier sources developed in Sumer and Babylon (see Sumerian and Babylonian art) and upon local Anatolian culture of the 3d millennium B.C., characterized by elaborate gold and bronze ornamental work found at Alaça Hüyük and earlier neolithic remains found at Çatal Hüyük dating from the 7th millennium B.C. The Hittites quickly assimilated many aspects of the cultures they overran. They adopted a pantheon of Mesopotamian and N Syrian gods and represented them in their art—the males with high pointed hats, short-skirted robes, and boots with long, curling toes, and the females with long, pleated robes and square hats.

The Hittites were accomplished carvers and metalworkers. Among the most impressive late representatives of Hittite deities is a series of ornaments from Carchemish made to adorn a royal golden robe; they are carved in steatite and lapis lazuli and mounted in gold cloisons, each 5/8 in. (14.5 cm) high (7th cent. B.C.; British Mus.). The Hittites adapted the Babylonian cuneiform to their language and also employed an elaborate hieroglyphic script for the engraving of monuments.

Although animal figures are to be found in abundance in the artistic remains of the Hittites, their chief concern was human activity, particularly religious ritual. At the Great Sanctuary of Yazilikaya near Boğazköy is a magnificent series of mythological scenes in carved rock depicting lions and sphinxes attending gods and goddesses. At Ivriz another rock relief represents King Warbalawa praying before the god Tarhan, a capped and booted figure hung about with grapes and holding grain to symbolize fertility (8th cent. B.C.).

There remain fewer representations of royal domestic life, including a hunting scene from Alaça Hüyük (200 B.C., Archaelogical Mus., Ankara), a family procession with King Araras with his children and their nurse and pets from Carchemish (750 B.C.), and a few polychrome vase paintings from Bitik, near Ankara, one of which is thought to depict a marriage. Other vases were made in animal shapes (e.g., duck vase, c.1700 B.C., from Beycesultan, Archaeological Mus., Ankara) and in the form of domestic items (e.g., boot vase, 19th cent. B.C., from Kültepe, Archaeological Mus., Ankara). A minor art of considerable development was the signet seal, generally containing figures and a cuneiform inscription, which the Hittites used instead of the cylinder seal popular with neighboring cultures.

Hittite Architecture

The principal architectural remnant of the Hittite civilization is at Boğazköy, where temple structures and the city walls may be seen. The Hittites developed the bit-hilani, a porticoed entrance hall built with a stairway approach flanked by pillars. Another characteristic form was the double gateway with corbeled arch, decorated with friezes and protected on either side by a threatening beast figure. Among the best-known of these is the lion gate at Hattuşaş, the ancient Hittite capital (c.1600 B.C.). These gate figures were later to be copied and used in the churches of Western Europe. In building interiors wall painting was evidently practiced with considerable sophistication, but only a few fragments of this work remain, principally at Boğazköy and Atchana in N Syria.

See Assyrian art; Phoenician art.

Early Greek Styles

Two great cultures—the Minoan civilization and the Mycenaean civilization—had developed complex and delicate art forms. Before 1000 B.C. invasions of Dorians and other barbarian tribes from the north laid waste the earlier Aegean cultures. While there was not the definite cultural break once envisaged by archaeologists, the chaotic conditions caused by the invasions produced at first a decline in artistic production and then a slow transformation into a new art. A geometric scheme with linear patterns replaced the curvilinear designs and naturalistic representations of the Mycenaean age. When human and animal life was again represented, the forms assumed were schematized and formal. The pottery of the late geometric period (c.900-700 B.C.) is characterized by two-dimensional stylized patterns, effectively designed but bearing little relation to nature. Between 700 and 600 B.C. this geometric style gave way to new interest in representation, and Asian influence encouraged the use of floral and arabesque designs and the adoption of Asian monster and animal themes.

The Archaic Period

During the archaic period (c.660-480 B.C.) sculpture emerged as a principal form of artistic expression. Dating from the beginning of this period are magnificent statues of nude walking youths, the kouroi, which suggest Egyptian prototypes but which are distinctive in stylization and tension of movement (e.g., Kouros, Metropolitan Mus.). Draped female sculptures from the archaic period suggest Middle Eastern influence (e.g., Hera of Samos, Louvre).

Vase painters depicted mythological scenes and, toward the end of the archaic period, many scenes from contemporary life. Outstanding was the Athenian school of black-figured vase painting led by the painter Execias. The appearance of the red-figured style of vase painting (c.525 B.C.) showed increased concern with the rendering of three-dimensional space and naturalistic detail. Euthymides and Euphronius were among the great early masters in this medium. About a generation later masterpieces were produced by the painters Brygos and Duris.

The Early Classical Period

In the early classical, or transitional, period (c.480-450 B.C.) a new humanism began to find its aesthetic expression in terms of a perfect balance between verisimilitude and abstraction of form. The largest surviving single group of sculpture is from the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Although certain conventions in rendering hair and draperies persist from the archaic period, the magnificent marble figures from the pediments reveal a new kind of insight into the structure of the human figure. Rare surviving works in bronze are the famous Charioteer (museum, Delphi) and the Zeus or Poseidon found in an ancient shipwreck off Cape Artemision (National Mus., Athens).

The Golden Age

The height of the classical period, or Golden Age (c.450-400 B.C.), was the time of Pericles and Thucydides, of the great dramatists Sophocles and Euripides, and of the young Socrates. The aesthetic ideal based on the representation of human character as an expression of a divine system embodying a rational ethic and ordered reality was integral to the culture. The sculptor Polykleitos sought to arrive at a rational norm for the structure of the ideal human figure.

The most magnificent original sculptures from this period are those from the temples of the Athenian acropolis. Earliest of these are the Parthenon sculptures including the frieze representing the Panathenaic procession and the pedimental sculptures (see Elgin Marbles). The Parthenon sculptors are anonymous, but Phidias is believed to have drawn up the designs. Somewhat later in date are the sculptures of the Hephaesteum, the Erechtheum, and the Nike Balustrade.

The Late Classical Period

In the late classical period (400-300 B.C.) there was increased emphasis on the expression of emotion in art. Sculptural works attributed to Praxiteles are characterized by elegance of proportion and graceful beauty. Powerful emotional effects are typical of the sculpture in the style of Scopas, and a new feeling for individualization and three-dimensional movement appeared in the art of Lysippos. Other sculptors of the period between 500 and 300 B.C. were Myron, Kresilas, Timotheus, and Bryaxis; painters included Polygnotus, Apollodorus, Zeuxis, Parrhasius, and Apelles. Aside from literary references, little is known about the actual work of these men. The style of the sculptors is adduced from fragments and Roman copies. Even less is known about the painters. From the vase paintings some reconstruction of the Greek school of mural painting is possible.

The Hellenistic Period

With the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek art entered its last great phase, the Hellenistic period (see Hellenistic civilization. The importance of Athens gradually declined, and cultural centers rose at Pergamum, Rhodes, and Alexandria. Masterpieces of this period include the Nike (Victory) of Samothrace and Aphrodite of Melos (both: Louvre) and the Pergamum Frieze (Berlin Mus.). Especially charming among the minor arts are terra-cotta figurines from Tanagra. Marked tendencies toward heightening spatial illusionism are revealed in sculpture and, judging from Roman copies, prevailed also in painting (e.g., Odyssey Landscapes, Vatican).

From the 2d cent. B.C. onward copies of former masterpieces of sculpture, which only approximate their prototypes, appear frequently along with vigorous group compositions closely related to the Pergamene school (e.g., Laocoön and His Sons, Vatican). Greek and Roman artists produced these copies of former masterpieces for private patrons or the Roman state, and most of our knowledge of classical Greek art is derived from them. Although the inventive originality of Greek culture declined at this time, its influence remained of paramount importance during the Roman and Byzantine periods, and has continued to be an inspiring force throughout the history of Western culture.

The Nature of the Gothic

The essential character of the Gothic period, particularly at the outset, was the predominance of architecture; all the other arts were determined by it. The character of the Gothic visual aesthetic was one of immense vitality; it was spikily linear and restlessly active. Informed by the scholasticism and mysticism of the Middle Ages, it reflected the exalted religious intensity, the pathos, and the self-intoxication with logical formalism that were the essence of the medieval. Gothic style was the dominant structural and aesthetic mode in Europe for a period of up to 400 years.

Characteristics of Gothic Architecture

It is generally agreed that Gothic architecture made its initial appearance (c.1140) in the Île-de-France, the royal domain of the Capetian kings. However, the inception of the style owes much to several generations of prior experimentation, particularly in Normandy (see Norman architecture). Although individual components in Gothic architecture, such as ribbed vaulting and the pointed arch, had been employed in Romanesque construction, they had not previously received such a purposeful and consistent application. While the structural value of the Gothic rib has been contested, its formal significance cannot be overestimated. It served above all to delineate the vaults with a skeletal web that gave to the entire structure an articulation of impressive clarity.

Unlike Romanesque architecture, with its stress on heavy masses and clearly delimited areas, Gothic construction, particularly in its later phase, is characterized by lightness and soaring spaces. The overall effect of the Gothic cathedral combined this lightness with an innumerable subdivision and multiplicity of forms. The introduction (c.1180) of a system of flying buttresses (see buttress) made possible the reduction of wall surfaces by relieving them of part of their structural function. Great windows could be set into walls, admitting light through vast expanses of stained glass. Wall surfaces of High Gothic churches thus have the appearance of transparent and weightless curtains. The spiritual and mysterious quality of light is an important element of the religious symbolism of Gothic cathedrals.

In plan the High Gothic cathedral remained faithful to the traditional basilican form. It consisted of a central nave flanked by aisles, with or without transept, and was terminated by a choir surrounded by an ambulatory with chapels. These elements, however, were no longer treated as single units but were formally integrated within a unified spatial scheme. The exterior view was frequently dominated by twin towers. The facade was pierced by entrance portals often lavishly decorated with sculpture, and at a higher level appeared a central stained glass rose window. Additional towers frequently rose above the crossing and the arms of the transept, which often had entrance portals and sculpture of their own. Around the upper part of the edifice was a profusion of flying buttresses and pinnacles.

Landmarks of French Gothic Architecture

The first important example of Gothic architecture was the ambulatory of the abbey of Saint-Denis, constructed between 1140 and 1144. Saint-Denis embodies the first daring use of large areas of glass, coupled with a brilliant organization of space. Its influence was immediate, and the possibilities of the new style were eagerly explored in structures such as the cathedrals of Sens, Noyon, Laon, and Paris, begun in the ensuing decades of the 12th cent.

The High Gothic phase of architecture was ushered in by the Cathedral of Chartres, begun after 1194 and followed in rapid succession by the cathedrals of Bourges, Reims, Amiens, and Beauvais. These structures surged to unprecedented heights. A further reduction of opaque wall surfaces in favor of graceful screens of stone tracery and glass led toward the formation of the Gothic Rayonnant style around the mid-13th cent. The most striking achievements of Rayonnant design, the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and the Church of St. Urban in Troyes, have walls almost entirely of glass, held in place by only a thin skeletal frame of masonry.

Gothic Architecture Outside France

The adoption of Gothic architecture in various parts of Western Europe resulted in interesting variations and developments of the style. The cathedrals of Lincoln and Salisbury typify the early English style (late 12th-early 13th cent.). They retain much of the ponderous mural quality of earlier Norman architecture. In Italy height was usually subordinated to width, in a perpetuation of Romanesque proportions. French models served as inspiration for German churches of the 13th cent., notably at the cathedral in Cologne. Spanish Gothic architecture of this period was also based largely on French monuments; the forms, however, were modified, as in Toledo and Burgos, in the direction of greater ornamental display, partly derived from Moorish precedents.

Late Gothic Styles

In the 13th cent. the newly founded orders of Franciscans and Dominicans erected large hall churches of unassuming sobriety. The simplicity and functional character of these buildings, shown in such structures as the interior of Santa Maria Novella in Florence or the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse, contrasts with the trend toward richness in ornamental elaboration apparent in later Gothic art. In the 14th and 15th cent., these tendencies culminated in intricate webs of tracery, as in the towers of the cathedrals at Ulm and Strasbourg in Germany and in the flamboyant style of the Church of Saint-Maclou in Rouen in France. In England the same exuberance of decoration is manifested in the Decorated style of Bristol and Ely cathedrals and the even more elaborate Perpendicular style, exemplified in the choir of the cathedral at Gloucester.

Building activity, however, was seriously affected by the economic crises of the 14th cent. and by the Black Death, and later Gothic constructions were far less ambitious in scope than those of the preceding period. However, the Gothic tradition never completely died out, and in the 19th cent. it enjoyed a revival in Europe and in the New World inspired chiefly by the romantic movement (see Gothic revival).

Sculpture and stained glass were formally and spiritually integrated within the Gothic cathedral to express a theological program or scheme. The Royal Portal at Chartres (mid-12th cent.) exemplifies the early achievements in the development toward a coherent sculptural scheme; the tympanum, archivolts, and jamb figures are newly united structurally and iconographically to emphasize the importance of Christ on earth. Images of Christ begin to reveal a tendency toward greater humanization.

By the first half of the 13th cent., the role of the Virgin Mary as the intermediary between God and humanity is stressed in the sculptural programs of Laon, Notre-Dame de Paris, and the north transept of Chartres. At the same time figures began to protrude more strongly from their architectural background. Whereas the jamb figures of the Royal Portal at Chartres were formally no more than splendid humanized columns, by the 13th cent. individual sculptural elements became more important and less united with the architecture. The portal figures of the cathedral at Reims provide an eloquent example of the trend toward sculptural independence.

From the mid-13th cent. onward, mannerisms in gesture developed, such as the "hip-shot" pose, notable in the statue of the Virgin and Child at Amiens. This swaying posture further separated sculpture from architecture. In the 14th cent., after the completion of the great cathedrals, sculpture became an independent artistic form. Mannerisms were exaggerated into an elegant style that continued into the 16th cent. There was a parallel trend toward greater realism, which had its origin in sepulchral portrait sculpture. The tendency toward realism reached monumental form in the Well of Moses (Dijon; 1395-1403) by Claus Sluter.

The influence of French Gothic sculpture spread throughout the Continent and England. The finest and most individual examples are found in Germany in the middle of the 13th cent. in the facades of Bamberg, Strasbourg, and Naumbourg cathedrals, the last showing evidence of a powerfully realistic, wholly German style. In Italy the late 13th-century works of Giovanni Pisano (see Nicola Pisano) in Siena and Pistoia and of Lorenzo Maitani at Orvieto reflect the heightened expressiveness found in French Gothic art.

Monumental fresco painting was rare in the Gothic period except in Italy, where the massive walls remained instead of yielding to the tall skeletal structure found elsewhere. In the rest of Europe stained glass and tapestry assumed greater importance and showed a stylistic development analogous to that of sculpture.

Another aspect of Gothic painting was manuscript illumination, in which text and pictures formed a united composition. From the beginning of the 13th cent., illuminations were done for the courts by lay schools. The Paris school achieved a perfection which made it the center of Gothic painting for nearly two centuries. English miniatures are often indistinguishable from the French in this period. The painters of the Avignon school flourished from 1309, when the papal court was moved there from Rome. This school produced one work, a Pietà from Villeneuve-lès-Avignon (Louvre; c.1460), of such originality of expression that it stands outside the established categories of Gothic painting.

The Waning of the Gothic Style

Toward the end of the 14th cent., many Flemish artists went to France, and a Franco-Flemish style was created, showing an elegance and interest in minute detail; so wide was its diffusion that it came to be known as the International Style. At about this time panel painting, under the lead of Flanders and Italy, achieved preeminence over all other forms of painting. In the 15th cent. individual painters, such as Stephan Lochner, Martin Schongauer, and Mathias Grünewald in Germany, mark the culmination of Gothic art. Others, such as Jean Fouquet in France and the Van Eycks in Flanders, point the way to the Renaissance, while retaining much of the Gothic spirit. In 15th-century Italy, where the Gothic style had never really taken root, the early Renaissance was already in full flower.

The Carolingian and Ottonian Periods

Carolingian architecture and art are commonly considered to have been the earliest manifestations of discernibly Germanic art. As the center of Charlemagne's empire, the Rhineland was the home of the massive palace chapel at Aachen (c.800), decorated with mosaics, and of contemporary churches such as the one at Fulda. Many of these show the revival of early Christian plans (see Early Christian art and architecture). Carolingian ivory book covers and diptychs were also notable.

The first outstanding examples of German painting and sculpture were created (c.960-c.1060) during the Ottonian dynasty. Splendid manuscripts, enriched by illuminations remarkable for their force of linear expression, issued from the school of Reichenau (e.g., the Gospels of Otto III, State Library, Munich), while in Cologne miniature painting exhibited a brilliant use of color. Fine craftsmanship is apparent in the metalwork of this period, from the small objects produced by the goldsmiths of Mainz to more massive achievements, such as the bronze doors (1015) for the Church of St. Michael at Hildesheim. The architecture of St. Michael's exemplifies a tendency in Ottonian buildings toward the development of a complex ground plan. A highly rational system was devised of dividing the church into a series of separate units, a method that was to be of consequence in Romanesque design.

The Romanesque and Gothic Periods

Romanesque architecture and art flourished in Germany, and the cathedrals in basilica form at Worms, Mainz, and Speyer typify the characteristic divisive style of the period. Little remains of Romanesque fresco painting, of which Regensburg and Salzburg were major Germanic centers.

With the diffusion of the French Gothic style throughout Europe (see Gothic architecture and art), notable contributions were made by the Germans. The magnificent sculpture of the portals for the cathedrals at Bamberg, Strasbourg, and Naumburg was executed during the first half of the 13th cent. French influence is most strongly revealed in the cathedral of Cologne (c.1250). Modifying the French emphasis on decoration, however, the Germans built simpler, unadorned piers and evolved a more unified, spacious form of church. This style may be seen in the Church of St. Sebald (c.1370), Nuremberg, or in the cathedral (c.1470) at Munich.

The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Outstanding German sculpture was created in the late 15th cent. with the powerfully realistic works, particularly in wooden altarpieces, of Peter Vischer the elder, Veit Stoss, Adam Kraft, and Tilman Riemenschneider. Active both as a sculptor and as a painter, Hans Multscher established the Swabian school. In the late 15th and early 16th cent., manuscript illumination and fresco painting declined as stained glass technique and panel painting became highly developed.

The refined paintings of Stephan Lochner are among those that reflect Flemish influence, particularly of the van Eycks and of Rogier van der Weyden. Martin Schongauer, painting at the same time, developed a more individual style, characterized by delicate and curving lines. Hans Holbein the elder, and Michael Pacher were among the other major 15th-century figures. The artistic genius of the century was Albrecht Dürer. His paintings, woodcuts, and engravings were produced at an unprecedented level of perfection, influencing all European art of the time. He visited Venice and was chiefly responsible for bringing elements of the Italian Renaissance style to Germany.

Painting in the 16th cent. was at its height in Germany and led all other arts. Hans Holbein the younger, Mathias Grünewald (creator of the last major Gothic altarpiece), Albrecht Altdorfer (who brought pure landscape painting into vogue), Lucas Cranach the elder, and Hans Baldung were the great masters of the age. Gothic architecture prevailed so long in Germany that when the Church of St. Michael's in Munich was built (c.1590), the Renaissance and mannerist periods had already ended, and early baroque churches, heavily influenced by Italian design, were being constructed.

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Some of Germany's finest buildings date from the 17th and 18th cent.—exuberant baroque and rococo churches and palaces that are marvels of lightness and spatial complexity. Among the best are the works of the Austrian Fischer von Erlach. Ceiling decoration was widely practiced. The rococo style came to the fore c.1730, with the Tischbein family and Angelica Kauffmann its chief exponents in painting. At this time, too, small Dresden china figures and groups became very popular, with the workshops at Meissen producing exquisite miniature statuettes of genre subjects. A. R. Mengs's work marked the widespread revival of classicism modeled on the theories of J. J. Winckelmann and on the art of Rome. Meanwhile, the monumental sculptures of J. G. Schadow were regarded as the model for a century of subsequent German plastic art.

The Nineteenth Century

In the early part of the century J. F. Overbeck, Schadow-Godenhaus, Peter von Cornelius, and Schnorr von Carolsfeld banded together to form the group of Nazarenes active in Rome. Alfred Rethel became a leader of a school of German historical painting. He and the realist A. F. E. von Menzel executed woodcuts as well and were responsible for the 19th-century revival of the medium. The Biedermeier period brought to the fore such genre painters as Moritz von Schwind and Carl Spitzweg. In the late 19th cent. a new wave of romanticism emerged that had been foreshadowed by the desolate landscapes of C. D. Friedrich and the complex allegories of P. O. Runge. Romanticism was exemplified in architecture by K. F. Schinkel. Romantic painters who were influenced by Italian art included Anselm von Feuerbach and Hans von Marées.

The Twentieth Century

The sentimental genre scenes and derivative neoclassic artistic production of the 19th cent. were replaced in the 20th cent. by a fresh, more vital sensibility. In the early years of the century the influence of Gauguin was strong. At the same time, English art nouveau design innovations were adopted in the applied arts in Germany and termed jugendstil.

The wave of 20th-century masters that emerged from the Berlin secession, led by Max Liebermann, created an art known as expressionism for its purposeful distortion of natural forms. The expressionist movement came in three waves: the first, the Brücke (1905), included E. L. Kirchner and Emil Nolde; the Blaue Reiter (1911) attracted several foreign artists, such as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Wassily Kandinsky; and in the 1920s Otto Dix and Max Beckmann were principal exponents of the disenchanted realism called the new objectivity. Artists working in related styles included Oskar Kokoschka and Käthe Kollwitz.

Several of these same artists also taught at the Bauhaus, led by Walter Gropius and later by Miës van der Rohe. This establishment became the chief breeding place of functionalism and encouraged experimentation and abstraction with the ideal of combining artistic beauty with usefulness. The Nazi regime, however, regarding abstract and expressionist works as degenerate, discouraged and destroyed any but heroic, propagandistic art, and the Germany of the 1930s and early 40s produced nothing of artistic significance. The Bauhaus aesthetic was taught and practiced in the United States by European expatriates and their disciples, while German architecture, massive and dull, glorified the Nazi style. In the period since World War II the dominant architectural designers have included Hans Scharoun, Helmut Striffler, Werner Duttmann, and Gottfried Bohm. The abstract movement has been led by Willi Baumeister, Theodore Werner, Fritz Winter, E. W. Nay, Winfred Gaul, and G. K. Pfaher.

Early History

Artistic remains in France date back to the Paleolithic age (see Paleolithic art), and abundant examples attest to the art of the periods of Roman and barbarian occupation as well as to the Christian art of the subsequent periods (see Merovingian art and architecture; Carolingian architecture and art).

The Romanesque Period

During the Middle Ages artistic production centered about the church and the feudal court. In the Romanesque period (11th-12th cent.) the church encouraged the development of manuscript illumination and the minor arts at several monastic centers including Reims, Tours, St. Gall, Paris, and Metz (see Romanesque architecture and art). Important schools of sculpture centered in the regions of Languedoc and Burgundy.

The Gothic Period

The hierarchic austerity characteristic of many Romanesque figures was modified in the period of Gothic architecture and art (12th-15th cent.) by tendencies toward idealization and naturalism. These tendencies are manifest in the sculpture of Reims and Amiens cathedrals, where the figures show greater variety of pose and articulation and are less severely architectonic than those of the preceding Romanesque period. Cathedral architecture gave impetus in the 13th cent. to the development of the art of stained glass, which reached its height in such windows as those of the cathedral at Chartres.

At the same time Paris became a center of miniature painting, in which Italian and Netherlandish innovations were adopted and the observation of natural detail became highly developed. Great patrons of art emerged, and Charles V transformed the Louvre into a treasure house for the government art collections. Toward the end of the Gothic period these influences began to be harmonized in terms of a style marked by a taste for formal simplicity and elegance, such as is revealed in the works of Jean Fouquet.

The Renaissance

In the 16th cent. there was a strong new wave of Italian influence. Francis I employed Francesco Primaticcio of Bologna as artistic director, and a school of French painters worked in an Italianate manner at the palace of Fontainebleau (see Fontainebleau, school of). The French sculptors Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon contributed classical grace and expressiveness to the work of the time. Elegant portraits were painted by Jean Cousin and Jean and François Clouet. French engraving gained significance in the works of the mannerists Jacques Bellange and Jacques Callot.

The Baroque Period

During the baroque era (17th and early 18th cent.) enthusiasm for classical antiquity, combined with a cult of rationalism, encouraged the development of a monumental and formalized art. The most important painters were the landscape artists Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, who worked in Italy. Other major painters of the period include Simon Vouet, Philippe de Champaigne, George de la Tour, and the Le Nain brothers.

The movement toward political centralization, culminating in the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, was attended by aesthetic authoritarianism marked by a consolidation and control of artistic production in the service of the state and the founding of art institutions. The French Academy was chartered in 1635, and the Gobelins tapestry factory was established in 1662. Typical of the decorative magnificence of the age was the painting of Charles Le Brun and Pierre Mignard and the sculpture of François Girardon, Pierre Puget, and Antoine Coysevox.

The Eighteenth Century

The 18th-century aesthetic styles were named after the political periods of these turbulent eras. They include the régence style, the Louis period styles, and the Directoire style. After the ascension of Louis XV baroque monumentality was replaced by the lighter, more animated spirit of the rococo, which had early manifestation in the art of J. A. Watteau. François Boucher and J. H. Fragonard succeeded Le Brun as official painters; their decorative, sensuous style was favored by the court but not adopted generally. The genre and still-life painter J. B. Chardin and the sculptor J. A. Houdon exhibited independent tendencies.

Characteristic gracefulness and delicacy prevailed in the minor arts, exemplified in the bronze work of Jacques Caffieri and in Sèvres porcelains, produced at the royal potteries established in 1745 at Vincennes and moved to Sèvres in 1753. A self-important manner in portraiture flourished in the work of Nicolas de Largillière and Jean-Marc Nattier.

Toward the end of the 18th cent. reaction against the frivolity of court art and interest in new archaeological excavations encouraged the rise of the neoclassical style, which found government favor under the Directory, Consulate, and Empire. Its principal exponent was J. L. David, at first the king's and later Napoleon's official painter. David wielded authoritarian influence over the national taste (see Empire style).

The Nineteenth Century

After neoclassicism, no single style predominated in the early part of the century. Rather, individual artists gave definition to a variety of movements. J. A. D. Ingres succeeded David as leading academician and favored an essentially linear and meticulously finished style, in part inspired by a new enthusiasm for the art of the Italian Renaissance. Opposed to the academic discipline manifest in yearly Salon exhibitions were the romantic painters led by Delacroix and Géricault. At the same time that romanticism championed subjective emotion, the artist's independence from social purpose, and the taste for exotic subject matter, various currents of realism had notable exponents in Honoré Daumier, J. B. C. Corot, and Gustave Courbet. Revived interest in landscape painting was revealed in the works of the Barbizon school.

After the middle of the 19th cent. interest in rendering purely visual effects and in expressing transient and accidental aspects of nature resulted in the emergence of impressionism, an enormously influential movement that was formally launched with the exposition of 1874. This movement drew allegiance from a variety of highly individual artists including Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Pissarro. Cézanne drew inspiration from the impressionist group, but he rejected their emphasis on transient effects and evolved an independent approach based on the expression of the fundamental characteristics of shapes and spatial effects. Toward the end of the 19th cent. a postimpressionist reaction arose in the work of Seurat, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Gauguin.

In comparison with painting, 19th-century sculpture on the whole maintained more conservative trends. In the first half of the century, François Rude infused his works with an animation that marked a break with the neoclassic conventions. A. L. Barye, notable for his animal sculptures, and J. B. Carpeaux, the leading sculptor of the Second Empire, exemplify tendencies toward naturalism and an interest in rendering effects of movement that reached their culmination in the second half of the century in the powerful sculpture of Auguste Rodin.

The break with the 18th-century tradition effected by the Revolution, combined with increasing substitution of machine for hand labor, resulted in a marked decline in quality of design and craftsmanship in the decorative arts of 19th-century France. On the whole a heavy-handed eclecticism prevailed. Various elements from the styles of the Louis XIV and Louis XV periods were combined with surviving neoclassic forms.

The Twentieth Century

The innovations of postimpressionism, combined with the influence of Cézanne and a new current of interest in the art of Africa, to give rise to the early 20th-century movements of fauvism, led by Matisse and Rouault, and cubism, created by Picasso and Braque. Picasso's work, spanning seven decades, provided in its enormous variety of styles a working vocabulary for many of the major art movements of the 20th cent. After World War I a further reaction against the decorative and formal emphasis of prewar art resulted in the emergence of surrealism and Dada. Paris had become the artistic center of Europe in the 19th cent. and the school of Paris continued as a source of aesthetic inspiration in the 20th cent.

In sculpture, a new emphasis on relatively static, simplified forms was shown in the works of Aristide Maillol and the Romanian Constanin Brancusi, who worked in Paris and whose strong, exquisite style had a profound influence on 20th-century sculpture. Other major sculptors of the modern era include Charles Despiau, Henri Laurens, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon.

After 1945 the leading painters, including Nicholas de Staël, Jean Fautrier, Georges Mathieu, and Pierre Soulages worked in the idiom of abstract expressionism, while Jean Dubuffet emerged as the initiator of l'art brut, with strikingly grotesque images constructed of almost any conceivable sort of material.

In the decorative arts, the 20th cent. saw an attempt to revive the craft tradition and to introduce nonderivative designs. Leading artists such as Maillol, Matisse, and Lurç furnished tapestry and textile designs. In addition, new tendencies toward simplification and functionalism were manifest in the furniture of the modern style. More recently, postmodernism has had a strong effect on the decorative arts.

The Medieval Period

During the Middle Ages, Flemish art followed the contemporary early Christian, Carolingian, and Romanesque styles. In the 12th cent. Rainer of Huy, Godefroid de Claire, and Nicholas of Verdun, among others, were noted for their work in metal and enamel. In the same century an important late Romanesque cathedral was built at Tournai (see Romanesque architecture and art). In succeeding centuries, the metalworks of Dinant lent their name to the French word dinanderie, for metalwork, and Flemish brass workers and copper workers produced sophisticated pieces.

Splendid examples of secular architecture were executed in the 14th and 15th cent., including the Ypres cloth hall and the city halls of Brussels and Louvain. At Tournai painting, sculpture, and tapestry-making also flourished. Flanders followed the French in their adaptation of Gothic styles until the late 14th cent., when Flemish artists contributed vigorously realistic figures to the elegant, more fragile French manner of painting and manuscript illumination (see also Gothic architecture and art). Jean de Cambrai introduced similarly powerful and realistic forms into French sculpture, along with André Beauneveu and Jacques de Baerze. Jean Bondol of Bruges was a leading illuminator and tapestry designer.

The marriage in 1369 of the daughter of the count of Flanders to the duke of Burgundy led to a concentration of artists around the wealthy Burgundian court. It was the center of activity for such painters and manuscript illuminators as Melchior Broederlam, the Limbourg brothers, the Boucicaut master, Jean Malouel, and Jan van Eyck. Claus Sluter executed the famous sculpture at the court-sponsored Carthusian monastery of Champmol.

The Northern Renaissance and Its Aftermath

In Flanders Renaissance works of art took on a character quite different from those of Italy. The masterpieces of 15th-century Flemish painting are remarkable for their acute observation of nature, symbolism in realistic disguise, depiction of spatial depth and landscape backgrounds, and delicate precision of brushwork. The achievements in symbolism (see iconography) and realism of Robert Campin (identified with the Master of Flémalle) and the Van Eycks, who mastered the technique of oil painting in the first third of the century, were continued in the second third by Roger van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts, and Petrus Christus. These artists refined the depiction of psychological expression, landscape, and space.

In the last third of the 15th cent. Hugo van der Goes and Hieronymus Bosch were especially sensitive to complex emotional expression and fantastic subject matter, while Hans Memling, Gerard David, Joachim Patinir, Quentin Massys, Justus of Ghent, and Joos van Cleef produced paintings in a calmer mood, based on the achievements of earlier Flemings with occasional influences from Italian art. In general, with the exception of the brilliantly original Pieter Bruegel, the elder, late 15th-century Flemish art followed Italian models, although it preserved interest in genre realism and landscape painting as seen in the works of Paul Brill, Gillis van Coninxloo, and others.

Italy attracted many 16th-century artists, such as Jan Gossaert and Jan van Scorel, who returned to Flanders and imported Italian Renaissance forms and motifs into the North. At this time the center of Flemish artistic activity moved to Antwerp, where a school of mannerist artists arose, more clearly influenced by Southern European aesthetic development (see mannerism). Frans Floris was a leading representative of this trend. The 16th-century landscape style, emphasizing exquisite detail and brilliant color, persisted in the works of Jan Bruegel, the elder; Roelandt Savery; Joost de Momper; and Gilles de Hondecoeter, who worked in Holland.

Achievements of the Seventeenth Century

With Rubens, Flemish art again became preeminent in Europe, and his influence dominated painting throughout much of the 17th cent. The greatest patron of Flemish art remained the church, and Rubens's greatest influence was exerted through his religious paintings rather than his portraiture or his apotheoses of European rulers. Elements of his energetic line, brushwork, and understanding of form, his rich, warm color, and his ideal of robust beauty were emulated in the work of his pupil Jacob Jordaens and in that of his more consciously elegant and more highly individual follower Sir Anthony Van Dyck.

Still life and genre painting also flourished in 17th-century Flanders. Outstanding still-life painters included Jan Bruegel and Frans Snyders; genre painters included David Teniers and Adriaen Brouwer. The principal exponent of classicism, the painter Abraham Janssens, brought elements of Caravaggesque painting to the Flemish school (see Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da). The graphic arts also flourished in Flanders at this time. The principal Flemish sculptor was François Duquesnoy, who practiced in Italy. Architecture in the later 16th and 17th cent. blended heavy northern decorative taste and steeply pitched roofs with Italian mannerist and baroque forms; the Antwerp town hall (1561-65) and Rubens's house (c.1610) are characteristic buildings.

The Eighteenth through the Twentieth Centuries

In the 18th cent. French rococo taste predominated in Flanders, but in the 19th cent. a flourishing Belgian school of romantic painters arose (see romanticism). They included Gustave Wappers, Hendrik Leys, and the genre painter Henri de Braekeleer (1840-88). Two other noted Belgians, Alfred Stevens and Henri Evenepoel, worked chiefly in Paris.

A number of figures stand out as exemplars of modern Belgian art. Foremost is James Ensor, an individualistic painter of grotesque personal visions whose major works were created by 1900. Important artists of the 20th cent. include the founders of Belgian expressionism, Jakob Smits and Eugene Laermans; the sculptor and painter Rik Wouters and later expressionist painters Frits van den Berghe and Constant Permeke; the internationally recognized exponents of surrealism Paul Delvaux and René Margritte; and the later painters of the abstract school Anne Bonnet and Louis van Lint. Victor Horta and Henri van de Velde are the major 20th-century Belgians architects.

See also articles on individual artists and architects, e.g., J. M. W. Turner; and styles, e.g., Decorated style; and the minor arts, e.g., Doulton ware.

Norman and Gothic Styles

The great impact of the Norman Conquest was manifested in the 12th-century Anglo-Norman churches, closely related to the Romanesque. They were built with extremely long naves, often with a rectangular east end, in contrast with the Gallic surge toward lofty, aspiring structures with a curved chevet. The cathedral at Durham (begun 1093) employs a complete system of ribbed vaulting, together with the pointed arch and concealed flying buttresses, which are thought to antedate these Gothic features in France.

England made a significant contribution in Gothic decorative styles. In phases known as the Decorated style (14th cent.; e.g., the cathedrals of Lincoln and Wells) and the Perpendicular style (late 14th-middle 16th cent.; e.g., Sherbourne Abbey and York Minster), exuberant and complicated networks of bar tracery and multiple ribbed vaults were devised, influencing the flamboyant style in France. In addition, a flourishing religious art of painting, sculpture, monumental brasses, stained glass, and embroidery enriched the medieval church in England. The splendid and unique Anglo-Saxon embroidery, known as the Bayeux tapestry (c.1066-77), attests to the English interest in dramatic narrative. It is thought to be one of the rare secular works of the period.

Enough architectural and memorial sculpture has survived to provide evidence of centuries of achievement, from the Anglican crosses of Cumberland (7th cent.) to the 15th-century figures of Henry V's chantry in Westminster Abbey. A similar long tradition can be traced in stained-glass windows still adorning many churches. Very little church painting has survived, but there are many superb examples of illuminated manuscripts, which by the 10th cent. show a considerable skill in the French Carolingian fashion (see illumination). The high development of this art form influenced the growth of English sculpture, which abounds in fantasies and grotesqueries of the medieval period. Early reliefs at Chichester (c.1140), Lincoln (c.1145), and Malmesbury (c.1160-70) are particularly noteworthy sculptural works.

The Renaissance

The transition from Gothic to a classic Renaissance style was slow in England. Religious art of every kind had declined drastically by 1540, with the dissolution of the monasteries and the break with Rome. John Thynne and Robert Smythson were major builders of the 16th cent. at a time when secular art and architecture began to assume greater importance. Manor houses and palaces were designed for greater comfort than in previous eras and were often arranged according to a symmetrical plan, facing outward toward a splendid garden. Attention was paid to the paneling and stucco adornment of interiors. English builders inconsistently adapted Italian designs, particularly the published works of Sebastiano Serlio.

From the Renaissance onward numerous foreign artists were imported by the nobility, largely for portraiture. From Holbein to Rubens and Van Dyck, these men found few worthy followers in England and no rivals. Such painters as William Dobson and Robert Walker could hardly compete with the Dutch Lely or the German Kneller. However, with the Elizabethan portrait miniaturists Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac and Peter Oliver, an English art of exquisite delicacy came into being.

The Seventeenth Century

From the first quarter of the 17th cent., masterly interpretations of classical architecture were being produced in England. Initiated by Inigo Jones, who modeled his buildings directly after antique structures and designs by Andrea Palladio, the Palladian style spread throughout England. After the great fire of 1666 much of London had to be rebuilt. Influenced by Italian Renaissance architecture, Sir Christopher Wren, drawing upon diverse sources, created an English baroque through his original and grandiose plans for the rebuilding of St. Paul's Cathedral and through the variety and ingenuity of his designs for 51 of the City churches. His successors were Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanbrugh, whose massive country houses were the crowning expression of the English baroque.

In painting, the achievements of the 16th-century Elizabethan portraitists were followed in the next century by the delicate accomplishments of such miniaturists as Samuel Cooper and Richard Cosway. Late in the 17th cent. English sculpture was dominated by the celebrated artist Grinling Gibbons, who decorated parts of Westminster Abbey and other churches and palaces.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

During the 18th cent. a more restrained architectural style was developed and made popular in the works of Lord Burlington, Colin Campbell, James Gibbs, and William Kent. The Georgian style in architecture (see Georgian architecture), decoration, furniture, silver, and the minor arts was developed during the reigns of the Hanoverian kings (1714-1820). An outstanding architectural fantasy employing Chinese decor was manifested in the Regency style, of which George IV's Royal Pavilion at Brighton (1815-22) is an example.

Early in the 18th cent., after two centuries of foreign domination in the arts, the English school of painting was revitalized by William Hogarth's brilliant and biting pictorial satires. The graphic art of social commentary that he began has flourished in England ever since. It was superbly expressed in Rowlandson's drawings at the close of the century, a time when an opposite trend, toward the poetic and mystical in the graphic arts, also reached its height in the work of William Blake and his followers, notably Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert.

In portraiture the 18th cent. produced a number of outstanding artists. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who helped found the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 and was the first Englishman to assert successfully the dignity of his profession, shares with Thomas Gainsborough the place of honor in English portraiture. Other major artists in this field include George Romney, Sir Henry Raeburn, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Gainsborough is distinguished, too, for his landscape painting, a genre in which England has made contributions of the first order. Notable 18th-century landscape painters were Richard Wilson, George Morland, John Robert Cozens, and Thomas Girtin. A type of painting that enjoyed great popularity in the 18th and 19th cent. was the sporting picture depicting hunting and racing scenes, a particularly English form of art. George Stubbs was the outstanding painter and engraver of this genre.

From the 18th cent. on, considerable advances were made in city planning, with the schemes of John Wood I and John Wood II at Bath, and, in the 19th cent., with the efforts of John Nash in London. In the latter half of the 18th cent. England was engulfed by a wave of neoclassicism, characterized by the greater availability of and greater stress on archaeological finds than during the Palladian trend. The principal exponents of neoclassicism were Robert Adam, Sir William Chambers, George Dance II, and Sir John Soane, all of whom developed tasteful variations of the style. In the late 18th cent. a search for the picturesque led to the resurgence of earlier modes, including Gothic, Renaissance, and Greek styles. Among the architects who exploited several styles were Robert Smirke and Sir Charles Barry.

By the Victorian period, the Gothic revival predominated and was developed to great effect by A. W. N. Pugin, who worked under Barry in the design of the Houses of Parliament. Other imaginative variations of the Gothic style were conceived by William Butterfield, W. A. Nesfield, and R. N. Shaw. The latter two and Philip Webb also created remarkable plans for domestic architecture, as did C. F. A. Voysey and Sir Edwin Lutyens toward the end of the 19th cent. Coinciding with the mid-19th cent. Gothic revival, new structural and spatial possibilities were being explored with the use of such materials as iron and glass. Sir Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace for the exposition of 1851 was a landmark in the direction of modern architecture.

Among the most gifted landscape painters of the early 19th cent. were R. P. Bonington and the leaders of the Norwich school (1803-34), John Crome and J. S. Cotman, who also excelled in the medium of watercolor. Their achievement was dwarfed by the two great landscape artists John Constable and J. M. W. Turner; developing totally different styles, they both created rich coloristic effects and worked with a spontaneity that had a strong influence on subsequent French painting. The English romantic period, of which they were the greatest exponents in painting, was followed by the rise of the Pre-Raphaelite school of D. G. Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Sculpture did not parallel the development of English painting, although John Flaxman, Sir Richard Westmacott, Sir Francis Chantrey, John Bacon, and Alfred Stevens worked effectively in a classicizing manner.

The Twentieth Century

England played a minor part in initiating experimental and intellectual movements in art and architecture during the 20th cent. but was profoundly affected by them. In 1933, 11 painters, sculptors, and architects formed a short-lived group known as Unit One, which aimed at furthering the contemporary spirit in the arts. Among those who attained international fame were the sculptors Henry Moore and Dame Barbara Hepworth and the painters Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash. A touch of macabre fantasy can be seen in the works of three noted 20th-century painters, Sir Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, and Francis Bacon. In 1954 the pop art movement originated in England in response to commercial culture. Well-known contemporary painters include Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Michael Andrews, Bridget Riley, and Christopher Wood; among notable sculptors are Reginald Butler, Lynn Chadwick, and Kenneth Armitage.

British art in the last two decades of the 20th cent., often called neoconceptual, has been quite eclectic and employed a variety of often mixed and sometimes surprising media. Much of the art deals with life's big questions, has a certain shock value, and shares a preoccupation with mortality and bodily decay. Probably the best known of England's post-Thatcher artists is Damien Hirst, whose images have included dot paintings, cabinets of pharmaceuticals, and, most famously, animals, sliced or whole, pickled in formaldehyde and displayed in glass vitrines. A wide range of other contemporary English works and artists include Chris Ofili's sparkling elephant dung-encrusted semiabstract paintings; Richard Billingham's deadpan photographic images; Rachel Whiteread's plaster casts and rubber sculpture of domestic objects; Jenny Savile's fleshy and disturbing nudes; Gary Hume's cool and brilliantly colored abstracts; Fiona Rae's jazzed-up abstractions; and Marc Quinn's controversial works, notably a cast of his head made with his own blood. Other notable English contemporaries include Ian Davenport, Gillian Wearing, Gavin Turk, Abigail Lane, Mona Hatoum, Marcus Harvey, and Sarah Lucas.

After World War II, there was an attempt to rebuild England in the modern spirit, and many urban buildings were influenced by the International Style. In addition, architects of the school dubbed "new brutalism" were inspired by Le Corbusier to search for new forms and textures. The cathedral at Coventry (consecrated 1962) is the setting for a synthesis of the arts, with a sculpture of St. Michael by Sir Jacob Epstein, a tapestry designed by Sutherland, and engraved glass walls; the new cathedral, designed by Sir Basil Spence, provides an effective contrast to the adjacent ruins of its Gothic predecessor. In more recent times, postmodernism has influenced a number of English architects. Among Britain's best-known contemporary architects are Lord Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Sir James Stirling.

The Decorative Arts

In the minor arts, English pottery became justly famous, and such wares as Chelsea, Derby, Doulton, Staffordshire, and the pottery of Josiah Wedgwood continue to be highly prized. The same can be said of furniture prior to the Victorian era and of the work of such famous designers and artisans as Chippendale, Sheraton, Hepplewhite, and the Adam brothers. William Morris did much to raise English standards in the applied arts, particularly in book design and interior decoration.

Earliest History

The art of predynastic Egypt (c.4000-3200 B.C.), known from funerary offerings, consisted largely of painted pottery and figurines, ivory carvings, slate cosmetic palettes, and finely worked flint weapons. In painting, a monumental treatment was given to designs like those drawn in red on buff-colored pottery from Hieraconpolis, a palace city of upper Egypt. Toward the end of the predynastic period, sculptors began to carve monolithic figures of the gods from limestone, such as the Min at Coptos. In the protodynastic and early dynastic periods (3200-2780 B.C.) some Mesopotamian motifs began to appear. The craftsmanship of the finely worked stone bowls and vases of these periods is particularly remarkable.

The Old Kingdom

With the beginning of the Old Kingdom, centered at Memphis (2680-2258 B.C.), there was a rapid development of the stylistic conventions that characterized Egyptian art throughout its history. In relief sculpture and painting, the human figure was usually represented with the head in profile, the eye and shoulders in front view, and the pelvis, legs, and feet in profile (the law of frontality). There was little attempt at plastic or spatial illusionism. The reliefs were very low; relief and shallow intaglio are often found in the same piece. Color was applied in flat tones, and there was no attempt at linear perspective. A relief masterpiece from the I dynasty is the palette of Namer (Cairo). It represents animal and human forms in scenes of battle with the ground divided into registers and with emphasis on silhouette in the carving.

In statuary in the round various standing and seated types were developed, but there was strict adherence to the law of frontality and a tendency to emphasize symmetry and to minimize suggestion of movement. Outstanding Old Kingdom examples of sculpture in the round are the Great Chephren, in diorite, the Prince Ra-hetep and Princess Neferet, in painted limestone, the Sheik-el-Beled (mayor of the village), in painted wood (all: Cairo), and the Seated Scribe, in painted limestone (Louvre). Probably because of its relative impermanence, painting was little used as a medium of representation; it appears to have served principally as accessory to sculpture. A rare example is the painting of geese from a tomb at Medum (Cairo).

Religious beliefs of the period held that the happy posthumous existence of the dead depended on the continuation of all phases of their earthly life. The artist's task was therefore to produce a statement of reality in the most durable materials at his command. Tombs were decorated with domestic, military, hunting, and ceremonial scenes. Entombed with the deceased were statues of him and of his servants and attendants, often shown at characteristic occupations.

The Middle Kingdom

The Middle Kingdom, with its capital at Thebes (2000-1786 B.C.), was a new age of experiment and invention that grew out of the turbulence of the First Intermediate Period (2134-c.2000 B.C.). The forms of the Old Kingdom were retained, but the unity of style was broken. Increasing formalism was combined with a meticulous delicacy of craftsmanship. The paintings of the rock-cut tombs at Bani Hasan (e.g., Slaves Feeding Oryxes and Cat Stalking Prey, Tomb of Khnemu-hetep) are outstanding for freedom of draftsmanship. In sculpture the sensitive portraits of Sesostris III and Amenemhet III (both: Cairo) are exceptional in Egyptian art, which at all other times showed a reluctance to portray inner feeling.

The New Kingdom

The art of the New Kingdom (1570-1342 B.C.) can be viewed as the final development of the classic Egyptian style of the Middle Kingdom, a combination of the monumental forms of the Old Kingdom and the drive and inspiration of the Middle Kingdom. The paintings of this period are noted for boldness of design and controlled vitality. In sculpture the emphasis is on bulk, solidity, and impersonality.

During the Amarna period (1372-1350 B.C.) a free and delicate style developed with many naturalistic tendencies and a new sense of life and movement. In sculpture the new style was carried to the point of caricature, e.g., in the colossal statue of Ikhnaton (Cairo). The outstanding masterpiece of this period is the painted limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti (Berlin Mus.). The delicacy, sophistication, and extreme richness of this style in its late period is best exemplified by the furnishings from the tomb of Tutankhamen.

The Ramesside period (1314-1085 B.C.) saw an attempt to return to the classic formalism of the earlier New Kingdom, but the vitality that characterized that period could not be recovered. The sculpture, both in relief and in the round, became monotonous and even overbearing except in the numerous battle scenes. The period of decline (1085-730 B.C.) is characterized by mechanical repetition of earlier forms in the major arts and by the introduction of satirical and often cynical drawings in the papyri. In the Saïte period (730-663 B.C.) there was an attempt to return to the austerity of the Old Kingdom style, but for the simplicity of the earlier forms a coarse brutality was substituted.

After the conquest of Egypt by the Assyrians in 663 B.C. all the arts declined with the exception of metalworking, in which a high standard of skill was maintained. Neither the Assyrian nor the subsequent Persian invasions left a mark on Egyptian art, and even under the Ptolemaic dynasty (332-30 B.C.) Egypt proved extraordinarily resistant to Hellenic conceptions of art. The ancient architectural tradition retained its vitality, as in the temples of Horus at Idfu and Isis at Philae, but painting and sculpture continued to decline. Native naturalism may have influenced the painted Fayum panels and orant (praying) portraits on mummy shrouds, but neither their subjects nor their style is essentially Egyptian. The minor arts, however, continued to flourish; alabaster vases, faience pottery and figurines, glassware, ivories, and metalwork were produced with the ancient skill and in the traditional Egyptian style.

Earliest Works

Little is known about Christian art in the first two centuries after the death of Jesus. Among the earliest manifestations extant are the early 3d-century paintings on the walls of the catacombs in Rome. Whereas the style resembles that of secular Roman wall painting, the subject matter consists mainly of biblical figures. Jonah, Daniel, and Susanna appear in scenes of miracles through divine intervention. Among the motifs that symbolized the hope of resurrection and immortality are the fish and the peacock. Following the official recognition of Christianity after the Edict of Toleration (313), the scope of Early Christian art was radically enlarged.

Mosaics and Manuscript Illumination

Elaborate mosaic narrative cycles covered the upper walls, triumphal arch, and apse of basilican churches (see basilica. Some are preserved in Santa Maria Maggiore and Santa Pudenziana in Rome and Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. The use of gold backgrounds heightens the effect of otherworldliness and transcendence. In contrast to paganism, the Christian faith was bound by the authority of sacred writings, and it placed increasing importance on the production of books and their illumination. Some fragments of the biblical text, written in silver and gold on purple vellum and sumptuously illuminated, are still preserved (see illumination). Foremost of these is the Vienna Genesis, a manuscript of the first half of the 6th cent.

Sculpture

The sculpture of the stone sarcophagus was extensively practiced in Roman art and was continued into the Christian era. In some cases subjects similar to those of the catacombs were used. In others, scenes of the life of Jesus or more ceremonious compositions were created, showing the enthroned Christ receiving the homage of the apostles. In addition, ivory carvers decorated book covers and reliquary caskets or larger objects, such as the throne of Maximianus in Ravenna, a work of the 6th cent.

Architecture

Before the legal recognition of the new faith in the early 4th cent., Christian places of worship were of necessity inconspicuous and had no fixed architectural form. Afterward, however, imposing cult edifices were erected in many parts of the Roman Empire, especially in its major cities, Rome, Constantinople, Milan, Antioch, and Ravenna. Early Christian builders adapted structures that had long been used in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. The basilican hall, consisting of a nave flanked by lower aisles and terminated by an apse, was adopted as the standard structure in Christian congregational worship. Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna and Santa Sabina in Rome still survive as largely unaltered examples of this type.

In Early Christian architecture a distinct emphasis was placed on the centralized plan, which was of round, polygonal, or cruciform shape. Baptisteries and memorial shrines (martyria) were based on the traditionally centralized Roman funerary monument. Martyria were erected on sites connected with certain events in the life of Jesus and other places held to be sanctified by the sacrifice of the martyrs. In such buildings as Saint Peter's in Rome and the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the martyrium structure and basilica were combined, creating a new formal synthesis of great significance for the religious architecture of the medieval period.

Eastern Traditions

A distinct type of Christian art and architecture was evolved in Egypt (see Coptic art). In the eastern part of the Roman Empire the development of the Early Christian tradition was continued under the auspices of the Byzantine emperors (see Byzantine art and architecture).

Early History

During the Middle Ages, Netherlandish art was subject to the leveling influence of the Romanesque and Gothic styles that prevailed throughout Europe. In the 15th and 16th cent. the southern, or Flemish, provinces in general led in quantity and refinement of production and set the artistic pace for the entire region (see Flemish art and architecture). Consequently, it is difficult to distinguish a development of national traits in the art of the Dutch provinces before the aesthetic florescence of the 17th cent. Moreover, the iconoclasm that attended religious and political upheavals in the mid-16th cent. destroyed much existing work.

The earliest known Dutch paintings, by such artists as Geertgen tot Sint Jans and Albert van Ouwater, date from the second half of the 15th cent. and are clearly related to the Flemish tradition of the Van Eycks. In the 16th cent. a profusion of Italian Renaissance motifs appeared especially in decorative sculpture, and centers of sculptural production grew up at Dordrecht, Utrecht, and Breda. In painting, enthusiasm for Italian art, combined with a kind of late revival of Gothicism, resulted in a mixture of mannerist and classicist elements in works by such painters as Cornelis Englebrechtsz (1468-1533), Jacob Corneliszoon van Oostsanen (c.1470-1533), Jan de Mabuse, Jan van Scorel, Maerten van Heemskerck, Hendrik Goltzius, and Cornelis Corneliszoon (1562-1638). At the same time, a continuing native tendency toward sober realism asserted itself in the works of Jan Mostaert, Antonio Moro, and Lucas van Leyden.

The Flowering of Dutch Art: The Seventeenth Century

The current of Italian Renaissance influence persisted well into the 17th cent. and is to be noted especially in the work of the most important sculptor, Hendrik de Keyser, whose style was perpetuated in the work of his sons Willem and Pieter de Keyser. The 12-year truce with Spain (1609-21) introduced a period of unprecedented cultural growth and material prosperity. Calvinist proscription of church art and the absence of extensive state patronage encouraged the development of private easel painting, and a heightened national pride was reflected in the immense popularity of pictures portraying the domestic scene and Dutch burgher activities.

The expressions of jovial burghers were captured in the rapid, vigorous brushstrokes of Frans Hals. Meanwhile, many other artists devoted themselves primarily to treating special types of material portraying contemporary Dutch life. Among these were Thomas de Keyser and Bartholomeus van der Helst, who were primarily portraitists; their works include many of the large group portraits of officers of corporations and guilds—a type of painting peculiar to Dutch culture. Adriaen van Ostade became well known as a painter of peasant scenes.

At Utrecht the 16th-century Italianate tradition persisted in the work of Abraham Bloemaert. The outstanding members of the Utrecht school, notably Gerard van Honthorst, Hendrik Terbrugghen, and Dirck van Baburen, went to Italy and were influenced by Caravaggio in their rendering of large-figured genre groups and isolated half-length figures of musicians and drinkers. With their dramatic rendering of light and shade, these artists, together with the classical and historical painters the Pynas brothers and Pieter Lastman, provided the background for the greatest figure to emerge in the history of Dutch art, Rembrandt van Rijn.

Rembrandt's genius was expressed in the whole gamut of subject matter, from portraiture, landscape, and interiors to still life and historical scenes. Unfortunately, his incredible mastery of all types of painting and the graphic arts was reflected only weakly in the art of his numerous pupils, among whom were Nicholaes Maes, Gerard Dou, and the most talented of his disciples, Carel Fabritius.

Toward the middle of the 17th cent. there was increased interest in the rendering of homely domestic scenes and views of urban life, seen in the paintings of Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, and Jan Steen. In the 1660s and 70s taste began to favor effects of wealth, elegance, and refinement. A tranquillity of atmosphere pervaded not only works of lesser artists but also the exquisite paintings of Gerard Ter Borch and Jan Vermeer.

Landscape also became an enormously popular subject, offering full scope to the native tendency toward pictorial realism. The painters depicted their countryside with a sensitivity and unpretentious sincerity that has made the Dutch school of landscape one of the most influential and esteemed of all time. At the beginning of the 17th cent. a mannered, decorative style was carried over from the 16th cent. in the landscapes of Gillis van Coninxloo. A straightforward contemplative realism emerged in work by such artists as Esaias van der Velde and the highly original Hercules Seghers.

In the second quarter of the century the landscapes of Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruisdael reveal a greater breadth of space and more dynamic composition. The culmination of these tendencies was reached in the art of Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, and Meindert Hobbema and in that of the great specialists in marine views, Jan van de Cappelle, Willem van de Velde, and Ludolf Backhuysen. Certain landscapists emphasized animal painting (e.g., Paul Potter) or concentrated on unusual light effects in sunsets and moonlight scenes (e.g., Aert van der Neer).

Outstanding Dutch still-life painters included Jan Davidszoon de Heem, Willem Claeszoon Heda, and Willem Kalf (1619-93). An outstanding painter of birds and wildlife was Melchior d' Hondecoeter. Also characteristically Dutch as subject matter were architectural interiors. Specialists in this field included Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de Witte. After the middle of the 17th cent. there was a long period of artistic decline. Even works of the principal artists in the last quarter of the century reveal tendencies toward empty elaboration of effects and pomposity or sentimentality of content.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

During the 18th cent. a strong wave of French influence encouraged renewed interest in historical and mythological painting and a heavy-handed imitation of rococo elegance. Among the more original 18th-century masters were Jacob de Wit (1695-1754) and Cornelis Troost (1697-1750). Not until the middle of the 19th cent. was there a revival of Dutch artistic culture—marked by the creative production of Jozef Israëls, Anton Mauve, Hendrik Mesdag, Johann Jongkind, and the Maris brothers. The outstanding genius of the second half of the century was Vincent van Gogh, one of the most important figures of the postimpressionist school.

The Twentieth Century

During the 20th cent., Dutch painting was strongly influenced by fauvism, cubism, and expressionism. Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg founded the movement known as de Stijl, which radically altered the development of international design. After World War II, Piet Ouberg (1880-1954) influenced a younger generation of artists with his colorful abstract composition. In 1949 the CoBrA (an acronym for Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam) group of avant-garde artists signaled the new tendency toward abstract expressionism. Contemporary Dutch art is best reflected in the works of Jef Diederon, Jan Dibbets, Stanley Brouwn, Jan Roland, and Ger van Elk. In the graphic arts an outstanding 20th-century figure is M. C. Escher.

Sculpture and the Minor Arts

In sharp contrast with the vitality of the Dutch school in painting and the graphic arts is its comparative lack of important sculpture. Outstanding among Dutch minor arts is the silverwork and goldwork of the 16th and 17th cent. There was also extensive production and export of ceramic tiles, of which the finest examples date from the late 16th and 17th cent.

Dia operates two museums—Dia:Chelsea (est. 1987, formerly the Dia Center for the Arts) in New York City and Dia:Beacon (est. 2003), the world's largest contemporary art museum, in Beacon, N.Y. Both are large, but the Beacon site, where some galleries are devoted to a single artist, contain unusually huge unbroken spaces ideal for exhibiting the frequently monumental and often minimalist (see minimalism) art and large-scale installations Dia favors. The foundation also funds massive land art projects in other parts of the country, such as Donald Judd's installations at Marfa, Tex.; Michael Heizer's City in Nevada; James Turrell's Roden Crater in Arizona; and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field in New Mexico (see land art). Dia's permanent collection includes pivotal works by such artists as Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Judd, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol.

Coptic art is characterized by a high degree of stylization verging on abstraction. Forms are flattened out, and individual motifs acquire bold simplicity and decorative character. Subject matter represents both Christian and Roman sources. Remains of wall paintings reveal scenes from the Old and New Testaments and images of the Mother and Child. Some of the archaeological sites are El-Bagawat, Oxyrhynchus, Sakkara, Bawit, and Antinoë. Representative examples of Coptic art are in sculpture, textiles, ivory, and illumination. Coptic architecture, as shown in the 5th-century White and Red monasteries near Sohag, showed traces of local Egyptian traditions.

Early Periods

Neolithic cultures produced many artifacts such as painted pottery, bone tools and ornaments, and jade carvings of a sophisticated design. Excavations at B'ei-li-kang near Luo-yang date materials found at that site to 6000-5000 B.C. An excavation in the early 1970s of the royal tomb of Shih-huang Ti revealed an array of funerary terra-cotta images. In Henan, the village of Yang-shao gave its name to a culture that flourished from 5000 to 3000 B.C. Ban-p'o pottery wares were handmade and the area produced a polished red ware that was painted in black with designs of swirling spirals and geometric designs, sometimes with human faces. Later, at Ma-jia-yao in Gansu, brush-painted pottery became more sophisticated in the handling of the design. Knowledge of ancient Chinese art is limited largely to works in pottery, bronze, bone, and jade.

The Early Dynasties: Ritual Bronzes

During the Shang dynasty (c.1750-1045 B.C.), some of China's most extraordinary art was created—its ritual bronzes. Cast in molds, these sacrificial vessels display stylistic developments that began with early bronzes at Erh-li-tou and reached their apex at Anyang, the Shang capital city, where excavations in have yielded numerous ritual bronze vessels that indicate a highly advanced culture in the Shang dynasty in the 2d millennium. The art of bronze casting of this period is of such high quality that it suggests a long period of prior experimentation.

The ritual bronzes represent the clearest extant record of stylistic development in the Shang, Chou, and Early Han dynasties. The adornment of the bronzes varies from the most meager incision to the most ornate plastic embellishment and from the most severely abstract to some naturalistic representations. The Later Han dynasty marks the end of the development of this art, although highly decorated bronze continued to be produced, often with masterly treatment of metal and stone inlays.

Buddhist Art

The advent of Buddhism (1st cent. A.D.) introduced art of a different character. Works of sculpture, painting, and architecture of a more distinctly religious nature were created. With Buddhism, the representation of the Buddha and of the bodhisattvas and attendant figures became the great theme of sculpture. The forms of these figures came to China from India by way of central Asia, but in the 6th cent. A.D. the Chinese artists succeeded in developing a national style in sculpture. This style reached its greatest distinction early in the T'ang dynasty. Figures, beautiful in proportion and graceful in gesture, show great precision and clarity in the rendering of form, with a predominance of linear rhythms.

Gradually the restraint of the 7th cent. gave way to more dramatic work. Major sites of Buddhist art in cave temples include Donghuang, Lung-men, Yun-kang, Mai-chi-shan, and Ping-ling-ssu. For about 600 years Buddhist sculpture continued to flourish; then in the Ming dynasty sculpture ceased to develop in style. After this time miniature sculpture in jade, ivory, and glass, of exquisite craftsmanship but lacking vitality of inspiration, was produced in China (and was also made in Japan).

Chinese Painting since the Fifth Century

Little painting remains from the early periods except for that on ceramics and lacquer and tiles, and tomb decorations in Manchuria and N Korea. It is only from the 5th cent. A.D. that a clear historical development can be traced. Near Dunhuang more than a hundred caves (called the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas) contain Buddhist wall paintings and scrolls dating mainly from the late 5th to the 8th cent. They show first, simple hieratic forms of Buddha and of the bodhisattvas and later, crowded scenes of paradise. The elegant decorative motifs and certain figural elements reveal a Western influence.

A highly organized system of representing objects in space was evolved, quite different from Western post-Renaissance perspective. Rendering of natural effects of light and shade is almost wholly absent in this art, the greatest strength of which is its incomparable mastery of line and silhouette. One of the earliest artists about whom anything is known is the 4th-century master Ku K'ai-chih, who is said to have excelled in portraiture.

The art of figure painting reached a peak of excellence in the T'ang dynasty (618-906). Historical subjects and scenes of courtly life were popular, and the human figure was portrayed with a robustness and monumentality unequaled in Chinese painting. Animal subjects were also frequently represented. The 8th-century artist Han Kan is famous for his painting of horses. The T'ang dynasty also saw the rise of the great art of Chinese landscape painting. Lofty and craggy peaks were depicted, with streams, rocks, and trees carefully detailed in brilliant mineral pigments of green and blue. These paintings were usually executed as brush drawings with color washes. Little if anything remains of the work of such famous masters as Yen Li-pen, Wu Tao-tzu, Wang Wei, and Tung Yuan of the Five Dynasties.

In the Sung dynasty (960-1279) landscape painting reached its greatest expression. A vast yet orderly scheme of nature was conceived, reflecting contemporary Taoist and Confucian views. Sharply diminished in scale, the human figure did not intrude upon the magnitude of nature. The technique of ink monochrome was developed with great skill; with the utmost economy of pictorial means, suggestion of mood, misty atmosphere, depth, and distance were created. During the Sung dynasty the monumental detail began to emerge. A single bamboo shoot, flower, or bird provided the subject for a painting. Among those who excelled in flower painting was the Emperor Hui-tsung, who founded the imperial academy. Hundreds of painters contributed to its glory, including Li T'ang, Hsia Kuei, and Ma Yüan. Members of the Ch'an (Zen) sect of Buddhism executed paintings, often sparked by an intuitive vision. With rapid brushstrokes and ink splashes, they created works of vigor and spontaneity.

With the ascendance of the Yüan dynasty (1260-1368) painting reached a new level of achievement, and under Mongol rule many aspects cultivated in Sung art were brought to culmination. The human figure assumed greater importance, and landscape painting acquired a new vitality. The surface of the paintings, especially the style and variety of brushstrokes, became important. Still-life compositions came into greater prominence, especially bamboo painting. During this time, much painting was produced by the literati, gentlemen scholars who painted for their own enjoyment and self-improvement.

Under some of the emperors of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) a revival of learning and of older artistic traditions was encouraged and connoisseurship was developed. We are indebted to the Ming art collectors for the preservation of many paintings that have survived into our times. Bird and flower pictures exhibited the superb decorative qualities so familiar to the West. Shen Chou, Tai Chin, Wen Cheng-ming, T'ang Yin, and Tung Ch'i-ch'ang are but a few of the many great masters of this period.

Under the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1912) a high level of technical competence was maintained, particularly in the applied arts, until the 19th cent., when the output became much more limited. The famous four Wangs imitated the great Yüan masters. Among painters of less orthodoxy, Shih-T'ao and Chu Ta were outstanding as artists of remarkable personal vision. However, there was little innovation in painting. Throughout the history of Chinese painting one characteristic has prevailed—the consummate handling of the brushstroke. Paintings were executed in a dry or wet-brush technique, with an incredible versatility ranging from swirling patterns to staccato dots.

Calligraphy and the Minor Arts

The mastery of brushwork was directly related to calligraphy, traditionally regarded by the Chinese as the highest art form. Masters of calligraphy such as Wang Hsi-chih (c.303-361) and his son were revered and their works copied for the perfection of their writing. Reliance on calligraphic techniques in later painting, however, produced a sterile art of overworked formulas in painting of the 19th cent. Elegant inscriptions and poems were often included within the painting, which took the form of a handscroll, hanging scroll, or an album leaf, made of silk or paper.

The fine art of Chinese ceramics followed to some degree the development of painting, reaching its highest perfection in the Sung dynasty and its extreme technical elaboration and decorative style in the Ming. In enamel ware, lacquerware, jade, ivory, textiles, and many other of the so-called minor arts, the world owes an incalculable debt to China.

Cross-Cultural Influences in Modern Times

Western influence on Chinese art has been evident since the late 17th cent., but was not of major significance until comparatively recent times. The 19th cent. produced no major Chinese masters but many competent traditionalists. Early 20th-century artists copied Western styles without real comprehension, and attempts to combine them with Chinese subject matter were largely unsuccessful. The influence of Chinese art upon other cultures has been profound. It has extended to the Muslim countries and, since the 14th cent., has affected the art of Western Europe as well.

Art under Communism

After the Communists came to power in 1949 the graphic arts useful to political propaganda were encouraged, and Western influence in the arts was strictly discouraged. Within the limits of government restrictions two painters, Li K'o-jan and Ch'eng Shih-fa, have produced works of considerable individuality. Chinese artists working outside China, including Tseng Yu-ho in Hawaii, C. C. Wang in New York, and Chao Wu-chi in France, have produced abstract works based on calligraphy that reveal some Western influence.

Carolingian Architecture

The new architecture, inspired by the forms of antiquity, abandoned the small boxlike shapes of the Merovingian period and used instead spacious basilicas often intersected by vast transepts. In some churches, such as Fulda and Cologne, the central nave ended in semicircular apses. An innovation of Carolingian builders, which was to be of incalculable importance for the later Middle Ages, was the emphasis given to the western extremity of the church. The facade, flanked symmetrically by towers, or simply the exterior of a massive complex (westwork), became the focal point of the structure. The function of the westwork is still debated. It had an elevation of several stories, the lowest a vaulted vestibule to the church proper, and above, a room reached by spiral staircases, which may have served as a chapel reserved for high dignitaries.

The outstanding structure of the Carolingian period still in existence is the palatine chapel at Aachen, dedicated by Pope Leo III in the year 805. It is centralized in plan and surmounted by an octagonal dome. The design of the palatine chapel appears to have been based in part on the 6th-century Church of San Vitale in Ravenna. Other important structures still partly preserved, or known through documentary evidence, include the churches of Corbie, Centula (Saint-Riquier), and Reichenau.

Carolingian Art

The best-preserved artistic achievements of the age are works of small dimensions—manuscript illumination, ivory carving, and metalwork. Besides the imperial court, at Aachen, the leading centers of art were the monasteries in Tours, Metz, Saint-Denis, and near Reims.

The earliest liturgical manuscripts of the Carolingian period, such as the Gospel book signed by the scribe Godescalc (written between 781 and 783), are characterized by a tentative and not always successful fusion of ornamental motifs of chiefly Anglo-Saxon and Irish origin and by figures derived from antiquity. Full-page portraits of the four evangelists were often designed. Later Carolingian miniatures show an increasing familiarity with the heritage of late antiquity and in some instances are perhaps influenced by Byzantine art. The manuscripts owe much of their beauty to the new minuscule form of writing, remarkable for its clarity and form. The most influential work was the Utrecht Psalter, illustrated in a mode of nervous and flickering intensity quite unparalleled in earlier Western art.

Closely allied in style to the miniatures were the ivory carvings, many of them originally part of book covers. Metalwork objects are rarer, although literary evidence shows that goldsmiths and enamel workers were active. The large golden altar of Sant' Ambrogio in Milan (executed in 835), the portable altar of Arnulf (now in Munich), several splendid book covers, and other sumptuously decorated objects provide insight into the artistic accomplishments of the period, which ended in the late 9th cent.

For a discussion of the art of indigenous peoples of Canada, see North American Native art.

The Colonial Period

Among the outstanding art forms of early colonial Canada was French-Canadian wood carving, chiefly figures of saints and retables for the churches. This art flourished from 1675 (when Bishop Laval established a school of arts and crafts near Quebec) until c.1850. The art reached its height after the separation from France when, freed from the French Renaissance tradition, it developed a local character beautifully exemplified in such work as that in the Church of the Holy Family on Orléans Island and in the Provincial Museum at Quebec. The two great Quebec families of carvers were the Levasseurs (18th cent.) and the Baillairgés (19th cent.).

The colonial period also produced fine embroidery (examples are kept at the Ursuline convent, Quebec) and several outstanding portraits executed in a naive folk-art style. Before 1880 most of the only other paintings and drawings produced in Canada were those by the colonial topographers, many of them English army officers. Most of this work is purely documentary.

Painting

Paul Kane, who painted Native Americans, and Cornelius Krieghoff, who depicted the life of the settlers, were the earliest genre painters. Thomas Davies produced vibrant landscapes in watercolor in the second half of the 18th cent. J. A. Fraser, known for his scenes of the Rockies, was instrumental in founding the Ontario College of Art at Toronto in 1875. Five years later the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (at Montreal) and the National Gallery of Canada (at Ottawa) were founded. Since 1910 the National Gallery has played an active part in Canadian life through its traveling exhibits. Its collection is the finest in Canada. Today there are art schools and galleries in all the major Canadian cities.

In the late 19th cent. the outstanding artists were the landscapists Daniel Fowler, F. M. Bell-Smith, and Robert Gagen; the portrait painters Robert Harris, Antoine Palamondon, and Théophile Hamel; and two great cartoonists, J. W. Bengough and Henri Julien. They were followed by a number of celebrated painters, including George A. Reid, Franklin Brownell, Florence Carlyle, F. McG. Knowles, Horatio Walker, M. A. de Foy Suzor-Côté, William Brymner, Maurice Cullen, and Tom Thomson. J. W. Morrice, who worked chiefly outside Canada, is perhaps the most celebrated of Canadian landscapists.

In 1920 Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Franz H. Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and F. Horsman Varley formed the Group of Seven, dedicated to painting the Canadian landscape. Traveling and working all over the dominion, they did much to awaken the interest of the country at large. Their approach, which emphasized flat, strongly colored design, tended toward a poster style. The cultural center of the Seven was Toronto. In Montreal toward the end of World War II a new, radical group was formed, including Alfred Pellan, John Lyman, P. E. Borduas, and J. P. Riopelle. They evolved the automatiste movement, influenced by Matisse, Picasso, and surrealism.

Other major painters, working in a wide variety of styles, include David Milne, Emily Carr, Pegi Nicol MacLeod, B. C. Binning, J. L. Shadbolt, and Harold Town. In the late 1960s the op art movement flourished in Montreal. Canadian painters currently at work employ a variety of postmodern styles and cannot be grouped as a school.

Sculpture, Decorative Arts, and Graphics

After the decline of wood carving, little sculpture was produced until 1900. Philippe Hébert, Suzor-Côté, Alfred Laliberté, Tait McKenzie, and Walter Allward became well-established sculptors. Among the later sculptors, Emanuel Hahn, Louis Archambault, Elizabeth Wyn Wood, and Henri Hébert are notable. The French Canadians have an important tradition in such decorative arts and crafts as metalworking and rug hooking. In the graphic arts Clarence Gagnon, W. J. Phillips, and Albert Dumouchel are considered among the foremost Canadian print makers of the 20th cent.

Architecture

Canadian architecture adheres in the main to European and American trends, especially in the planning of public buildings. From the 18th to the 20th cent., French Renaissance, English Georgian, Neoclassical, and Gothic revival designs were successively dominant. A notable example of Gothic revival is found in the buildings of Parliament Hill, Ottawa (begun 1859), by Thomas Fuller and others. The Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal), a modern archive and research center created by Phyllis Lambert, opened in 1989. Based on the ideas of H. H. Richardson, well-known structures in the château style are the Château Frontenac (1890), Quebec City, and the Banff Springs Hotel (1913), Banff, Alberta.

Major modern buildings include the Electrical Building and Civic Auditorium, Vancouver, British Columbia, and the Shakespeare Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. Church and domestic architecture in Canada have consistently shown originality. Particularly in Quebec during the colonial period, charming rural stone houses and churches were developed—typically low and rectangular, with steep pitched roofs and uptilting eaves. Moshe Safdie's remarkable "Habitat," a dynamic and original approach to housing, was erected in Montreal for Expo '67. Arthur Erickson is among the best-known of contemporary Canadian architects.

General History

For more than a thousand years, until the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Byzantine art retained a remarkably conservative orientation; the major phases of its development emerge from a background marked by adherence to classical principles. Artistic activity was temporarily disrupted by the Iconoclastic controversy (726-843), which resulted in the wholesale destruction of figurative works of art and the restriction of permissible content to ornamental forms or to symbols like the cross. The pillaging of Constantinople by the Frankish Crusaders in 1204 was perhaps a more serious blow; but it was followed by an impressive late flowering of Byzantine art under the Paleologus dynasty.

Byzantine Art

Byzantine achievements in mosaic decoration brought this art to an unprecedented level of monumentality and expressive power. Mosaics were applied to the domes, half-domes, and other available surfaces of Byzantine churches in an established hierarchical order. The center of the dome was reserved for the representation of the Pantocrator, or Jesus as the ruler of the universe, whereas other sacred personages occupied lower spaces in descending order of importance.

The entire church thus served as a tangible evocation of the celestial order; this conception was further enhanced by the stylized poses and gestures of the figures, their hieratic gaze, and the luminous shimmer of the gold backgrounds. Because of the destruction of many major monuments in Constantinople proper, large ensembles of mosaic decoration have survived chiefly outside the capital, in such places as Salonica, Nicaea, and Daphni in Greece and Ravenna in Italy.

An important aspect of Byzantine artistic activity was the painting of devotional panels, since the cult of icons played a leading part in both religious and secular life. Icon painting usually employed the encaustic technique. Little scope was afforded individuality; the effectiveness of the religious image as a vehicle of divine presence was held to depend on its fidelity to an established prototype. A large group of devotional images has been preserved in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai.

The development of Byzantine painting may also be seen in manuscript illumination. Among notable examples of Byzantine illumination are a lavishly illustrated 9th-century copy of the Homilies of Gregory Nazianzus and two works believed to date from a 10th-century revival of classicism, the Joshua Rotulus (or Roll) and the Paris Psalter.

Enamel, ivory, and metalwork objects of Byzantine workmanship were highly prized throughout the Middle Ages; many such works are found in the treasuries of Western churches. Most of these objects were reliquaries or devotional panels, although an important series of ivory caskets with pagan subjects has also been preserved. Byzantine silks, the manufacture of which was a state monopoly, were also eagerly sought and treasured as goods of utmost luxury.

Byzantine Architecture

The architecture of the Byzantine Empire was based on the great legacy of Roman formal and technical achievements. Constantinople had been purposely founded as the Christian counterpart and successor to the leadership of the old pagan city of Rome. The new capital was in close contact with the Hellenized East, and the contribution of Eastern culture, though sometimes overstressed, was an important element in the development of its architectural style. The 5th-century basilica of St. John of the Studion, the oldest surviving church in Constantinople, is an early example of Byzantine reliance upon traditional Roman models.

The most imposing achievement of Byzantine architecture is the Church of Holy Wisdom or Hagia Sophia. It was constructed in a short span of five years (532-37) during the reign of Justinian. Hagia Sophia is without a clear antecedent in the architecture of late antiquity, yet it must be accounted as culminating several centuries of experimentation toward the realization of a unified space of monumental dimensions. Throughout the history of Byzantine religious architecture, the centrally planned structure continued in favor. Such structures, which may show considerable variation in plan, have in common the predominance of a central domed space, flanked and partly sustained by smaller domes and half-domes spanning peripheral spaces.

Although many of the important buildings of Constantinople have been destroyed, impressive examples are still extant throughout the provinces and on the outer fringes of the empire, notably in Bulgaria, Russia, Armenia, and Sicily. A great Byzantine architectural achievement is the octagonal church of San Vitale (consecrated 547) in Ravenna. The church of St. Mark's in Venice was based on a Byzantine prototype, and Byzantine workmen were employed by Arab rulers in the Holy Land and in Ottonian Germany during the 11th cent.

Secular architecture in the Byzantine Empire has left fewer traces. Foremost among these are the ruins of the 5th-century walls of the city of Constantinople, consisting of an outer and an inner wall, each originally studded with 96 towers. Some of these can still be seen.

The Colonial Period

In the 17th cent. the North American colonies enjoyed neither the wealth nor the leisure to cultivate the fine arts extensively. Colonial artisans working in pewter, silver, glass, or textiles closely followed European models. The 17th-century limners, generally unknown by name, turned out naive but often charming portraits in the Elizabethan style, the Dutch baroque style, or the English baroque court style, depending upon the European background of both artist and patron.

The portrait painters alternated limning with coach and sign painting or other types of craftsmanship, and even in the 18th cent. it was seldom possible to earn a living by working at painting alone. Even the renowned silversmith Paul Revere also turned his talents to commercial engraving and the manufacture of false teeth. The crafts in general followed English, Dutch, and Bavarian models, although in furniture some variations appeared in the work of talented artisans such as Samuel McIntire and Duncan Phyfe.

In the first half of the 18th cent. a growing demand for portrait painting attracted such artists as John Smibert, Peter Pelham, and Joseph Blackburn from England, Gustavus Hesselius from Sweden, Jeremiah Theus from Switzerland, and Pieter Vanderlyn from Holland. Joseph Badger, Robert Feke, Ralph Earle, John Trumbull, and Charles Willson Peale did not depart widely from the tradition of 18th-century English portraiture, but despite some provincial awkwardness, their work is often more vigorous. In the early work of John Singleton Copley this vigor is combined with a great native talent.

Another 18th-century American painter, Benjamin West, set up shop in London and became painter to the king and president of the Royal Academy. Although his training and practice were European, his studio became a mecca for American painters who for half a century came to study under him. His teaching of historical painting did not stand them in good stead on their return to America, where there was little demand for such work. Gilbert Stuart, however, emerged from his tutelage a superb portrait painter and, after gaining success in England, returned to America, where he executed a long series of famous and charming portraits and set a standard rarely surpassed in the United States.

Of all the arts, sculpture was probably the least cultivated in the colonies. Apart from the anonymous carvers of tombstones and ships' figureheads, William Rush is almost the only known native sculptor to have practiced in pre-Revolutionary and early Federalist times.

From the Revolution to the Civil War

The period from the birth of the republic to the Civil War did not see much increase in the demand for the fine arts. Such early painters as Washington Allston, Samuel F. B. Morse, John Vanderlyn, and John Trumbull, who sought a market in America for historical painting in the neoclassical manner of Jacques-Louis David, were quickly disillusioned. Portrait painting alone provided the substantial patronage enjoyed by such men as Mather Brown, Henry Benbridge, Edward Savage, Thomas Sully, John Neagle, Chester Harding, and the miniaturists Edward G. Malbone and John Wesley Jarvis. Their work expressed the energy and self-confidence of the builders of the new American nation.

This period also saw the gradual rise of a number of excellent genre painters—Henry Inman, William Sidney Mount, Richard C. Woodville, David G. Blythe, Eastman Johnson, and George Caleb Bingham. These were the earliest painters of the American scene. In addition, J. J. Audubon created an extraordinary, detailed series of paintings of American birds. It is significant that he had to go to England for recognition and publication of his work. John Quidor painted scenes and legendary figures from the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving.

The first half of the 19th cent. witnessed development of the first school of American landscape painting. Thomas Doughty and Thomas Cole led the Hudson River school, which was continued by Asher B. Durand, John F. Kensett, and Frederick E. Church. The land and peoples west of the Mississippi were described in paintings by George Catlin, Charles M. Russell, and Seth Eastman, and in panoramic landscape views by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran (see under Moran, Edward). The work of these men showed a direct response to nature that has never ceased to be an important factor in American art. See luminism.

In addition, the characteristic American passion for objects realistically portrayed found remarkable expression in the paintings of William Harnett and John F. Peto, and earlier in the still-life works of the Peale family. The strain of primitivism, first evident in the limners, was more pronounced and popular in the early 19th cent. with works by Edward Hicks and Erastus Salisbury Field; it was continued by Grandma Moses and Horace Pippin in the 20th cent.

In sculpture portraiture provided the main source of patronage. John Frazee and Hezekiah Augur with little training produced forceful and original work in marble and wood. Horatio Greenough began the long tradition of the American sculptor trained in Italy, where he was soon followed by Thomas Crawford, Hiram Powers, and Harriet Hosmer. The American sculptors in Italy were greatly influenced by the Danish neoclassicist A. B. Thorvaldsen. Works of great originality were produced by Clark Mills, Thomas Ball, and particularly by William Rimmer, whose untutored sculpture was enormously powerful.

After the Civil War

In painting the post-Civil War period, which was one of unprecedented patronage for the arts from government and private sources, produced works of enduring worth and striking individuality. Among the many outstanding artists of this period, James McNeill Whistler, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer created works that rank among the finest achievements in American art. While they were contemporaries, these four are strikingly dissimilar. Whistler, an expatriate, cultivated a delicate art of suggestion in his oils and etchings, approaching the effects of French impressionism. Ryder produced a visionary art of profound emotional impact. Eakins painted sympathetic portraits of extraordinary psychological insight and uncompromising honesty. Homer's watercolors are among the strongest interpretations of pure landscape and seascape ever painted.

This period also saw the further development of the romantic landscape in the works of George Inness, Alexander H. Wyant, Homer D. Martin, and Ralph Blakelock. In Inness, and perhaps even more in William Morris Hunt, the influence of the Barbizon school was brought to America. Although French influence had begun to supplant German, the work of the portrait painters William M. Chase and Frank Duveneck reflected contemporary currents in Munich, as the earlier genre painters had reflected the influence of artists in Düsseldorf. John La Farge's religious murals and stained glass set a new standard for these arts.

John Singer Sargent, working chiefly in England, excelled in society portraiture, and Elihu Vedder and Edwin Abbey in illustration. At the close of the 19th cent. and the beginning of the 20th, John Twachtman, Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, and Mary Cassatt as well as such lesser-known American artists as Willard Metcalf (1858-1925) worked under the direct influence of French impressionism. Meanwhile, under the same influence, Maurice Prendergast created original, boldly colorful images of passing urban scenes. In a wholly different vein, realistic if somewhat romanticized scenes of life in the American West were painted by several artist-illustrators, the most prominent of whom were Frederick Remington and C. M. Russell.

In sculpture after the Civil War there was an increased demand for commemorative work. Notable sculptors in the monumental tradition include John Quincy Adams Ward and Daniel Chester French. The workshop of John Rogers produced small figures and genre groups that became popular. Later, Remington's small bronzes extended the subject matter of native realism westward to include the cowboy. Neoclassical tendencies dominated in the work of Olin Warner and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, both of whom studied in Paris.

The Twentieth Century

Among early 20th-century American sculptors Paul Bartlett, Karl Bitter, Frederick MacMonnies, George Barnard, and Lorado Taft exhibited a continuing conflict between naturalistic and idealized modes of representation. A significant cultural development of the era was the founding and expansion of American museums, whose collections were important to the art student and public alike. Under the impetus of new techniques of reproduction, the art of illustration flourished. The work of Edwin Abbey, Arthur Frost, and Howard Pyle was outstanding, appearing in Harper's and numerous other illustrated magazines and books.

Most importantly, in the 20th cent. American art turned to the exploitation of new techniques and new modes of expression. The functional design aesthetic of the machine strongly influenced all the arts. Meanwhile, the development of photography forced a reevaluation of the representational nature of painting, and the formal and expressive capacities of modern European art opened fresh fields for the American artist.

Early in the century a vigorous movement toward realism in subject matter and freedom in technique was headed by Robert Henri, John Sloan, and George Luks. With William Glackens, Everett Shinn, and others, they formed the Eight, a group also known as the "Ash-can School." They sought to communicate something of the reality of everyday life through art. At the same time, Alfred Stieglitz offered America early glimpses of fauve and cubist work from Europe and exhibited abstract paintings by such Americans as Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin at his revolutionary 291 Gallery for contemporary photographs and paintings.

The full force of European modernism was presented to shocked Americans in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, which was organized by such American artists as Arthur B. Davies, and Walt Kuhn. Under the influence of this exhibition, the early work of such Americans as Joseph Stella, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Charles Demuth, and Stuart Davis revealed new abstract tendencies. George Bellows and Rockwell Kent remained popular realists, and Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield developed a more poignant and intensely personal realism. John Marin caught the imposing breadth of nature in his watercolors, while Georgia O'Keeffe and Charles Sheeler combined realism with varying degrees of precise formal design.

Meanwhile, Peter Blume, Ivan Albright, and Edwin Dickinson developed differing and complex realist and surrealist styles. A chauvinistic espousal of the American scene flourished under Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood in the early 1930s, while the same decade and the 1940s saw the rise of a more socially conscious realistic art in the work of Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, Reginald Marsh, Jacob Lawrence, Isabel Bishop, and Raphael and Moses Soyer. Several years later this social awareness was given bitter expression in the paintings of Jack Levine.

Government sponsorship of the arts during the years of the Great Depression under the Dept. of the Treasury's Section of Fine Arts and the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration enabled many artists to continue working, embellishing many public buildings with murals and creating smaller works for display in public institutions. The Farm Security Administration supported the photographic documentation of rural America, a project that employed a number of outstanding photographers and resulted in a moving portrait of America in crisis. World War II brought an influx of European painters who were to influence the course of American art. They included Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy.

A continuing realistic tradition in American sculpture produced works in traditional styles during the 1920s and 30s. Among these are Gutzon Borglum's enormous Mt. Rushmore monument, the classicizing figures of Paul Manship, and Mahonri Young's naturalistic athletes and laborers. Nonetheless, the dominant tendency of national sculpture was toward abstract design and expressive form, a trend to which William Zorach, Gaston Lachaise, and, later, Leonard Baskin contributed figurative work. Alexander Calder pioneered in the use of mobile welded metal forms, adding motion as a new dimension in sculpture.

In painting from 1945-60 the work of all but the most intensive realists, such as Andrew Wyeth, tended increasingly toward abstraction. Such artists as Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and Helen Frankenthaler developed and employed abstraction in works of highly personal symbolic content, while painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, and Franz Kline created a bold and unique imagery that made American painting a dominant influence in world art (see abstract expressionism). In sculpture of the 1940s and 50s the free play of abstract forms in light and space and the use of new materials were vigorously exploited by David Smith, Theodore Roszak, Herbert Ferber, Isamu Noguchi, and Richard Lippold.

The pop art movement of the 1950s and 60s utilized an aesthetic based on the mass-produced artifacts of urban culture, rejecting the concepts of beauty and ugliness. Its major practitioners included Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Other nonobjective styles of painting and sculpture flourished concurrently with pop art during the 1960s, including op art, minimalism, and color-field painting.

No single school or style has dominated American art in the latter half of the 20th cent., as artists have sought numerous avenues of individual expression. Sculptural abstraction was developed in individual directions by John Chamberlain, Eva Hess, Carl Andre, Louise Nevelson, and Tony Smith; minimalist sculpture in particular was developed by Donald Judd. Postmodern developments in painting and sculpture include photorealism, conceptualism, neoexpressionism, assemblage, land art, and performance and process art (see performance art; see also contemporary art).

The ascendancy of women and minority artists since the 1970s has been marked by essentialism, the assertion of the artist's distinctive heritage or social circumstance, favoring a point of view typically presented as outside the mainstream of contemporary art. Imagery suggestive of female anatomy and sexuality has been central to the works of Judy Chicago; an awareness of stereotypes of African-American women has informed drawings and installations by Adrian Piper. Jenny Holzer in her work has made extensive use of the printed word.

No single trend can be said to have dominated American art in the closing decades of the 20th cent. However, in general, American art in the 1980s and 90s saw an increased occurrence of words as statement and image as well as a widened use of photography, collage, and a variety of other media. Also characterizing these decades was eclecticism in both materials and imagery, combinations of painting and sculpture in single works, a trend toward use of the ironic, a resurgance of realism, and a heightened use of "borrowings" from other periods and works of art.

The predominant art forms are masks and figures, which were generally used in religious ceremonies. The decorative arts, especially in textiles and in the ornamentation of everyday tools, were a vital art in nearly al