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cave art, generally, the numerous paintings and engravings found in caves and shelters dating back to the Ice Age (Upper Paleolithic), roughly between 40,000 and 14,000 years ago.

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Located in a limestone plateau of the Ardèche River in southern France, the property contains the earliest-known and best-preserved figurative drawings in the world, dating back as early as the Aurignacian period (30,000–32,000 BP), making it an exceptional testimony of prehistoric art.

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Sumer was an ancient civilization in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages. Although the historical records in the region do not go back much further than c. 2900 BCE, modern historians believe that Sumer was first settled between c. 4500 and 4000 BCE by people who may or may not have spoken the Sumerian language.

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Plastered human skulls are human skulls covered in layers of plaster, typically found in the ancient Levant, most notably around the modern Palestinian city of Jericho, between 8,000 and 6,000 BC, in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period.

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These images, whether statues or reliefs, were designed to benefit a divine or deceased recipient. Statuary provided a place for the recipient to manifest and receive the benefit of ritual action. Most statues show a formal frontality, meaning they are arranged straight ahead, because they were designed to face the ritual being performed before them. Many statues were also originally placed in recessed niches or other architectural settings—contexts that would make frontality their expected and natural mode.

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encompasses the cultures of Greece and Rome and endures as the cornerstone of Western civilization. Including innovations in painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture, Classical Art pursued ideals of beauty, harmony, and proportion, even as those ideals shifted and changed over the centuries.

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Art produced during the Middle Ages by the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire, spanning the fourth to the fifteenth century. The style is defined by devotional, Christian subjects depicted in angular forms with sharp contours, flattened colour and gold decoration.

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Islam began over 1,400 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula and soon spread across Asia, Africa, and Europe. Today Muslims live on every continent and make up a quarter of the world’s population. The term “Islamic Art” refers to a variety of artwork made by and for Muslims over the centuries. Here are some exquisite examples drawn from the museum’s collection.

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architectural style in Europe that lasted from the mid-12th century to the 16th century, particularly a style of masonry building characterized by cavernous spaces with the expanse of walls broken up by overlaid tracery.

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During the late thirteenth century, artists in a handful of Italian cities began to move away from the Italo-Byzantine style. The Roman artist Pietro Cavallini created frescoes and mosaics featuring solid, monumentalizing figures; the sculptor Nicola Pisano studied ancient Roman sculpture; Sienese artists seem to have broken new ground in exploring perspective.

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Florence is often named as the birthplace of the Renaissance. The early writers and artists of the period sprung from this city in the northern hills of Italy. As a center for the European wool trade, the political power of the city rested primarily in the hands of the wealthy merchants who dominated the industry.

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he High Renaissance was centered in Rome, and lasted from about 1490 to 1527, with the end of the period marked by the Sack of Rome. Stylistically, painters during this period were influenced by classical art, and their works were harmonious

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1500-1600 end of renaissance and reformation

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1500-1600 end of renaissance and reformation

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The Reformation (alternatively named the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation) was a major movement within Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church and in particular to papal authority, arising from what were perceived to be errors

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The Enlightenment – the great 'Age of Reason' – is defined as the period of rigorous scientific, political and philosophical discourse that characterised European society during the 'long' 18th century: from the late 17th century to the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

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Neoclassicism was an art movement that sought to evoke the style of classical antiquity in writing, painting, sculpting, and architecture found in Greek and Roman culture. Neoclassicism was most popular between the late 18th century and early 19th century.

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In the decades following the French Revolution and Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo (1815) a new movement called Romanticism began to flourish in France. If you read about Romanticism in general, you will find that it was a pan-European movement that had its roots in England in the mid-eighteenth century.

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The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: camera obscura image projection and the observation that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.

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Impressionism developed in France in the nineteenth century and is based on the practice of painting out of doors and spontaneously 'on the spot' rather than in a studio from sketches.

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Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted

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Abstract Expressionism was never an ideal label for the movement, which developed in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. It was somehow meant to encompass not only the work of painters who filled their canvases with fields of color and abstract forms, but also those who attacked their canvases with a vigorous gestural expressionism

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In the early 1900s, a group of young and rebellious Italian writers and artists emerged determined to celebrate industrialization. They were frustrated by Italy’s declining status and believed that the “Machine Age” would result in an entirely new world order and even a renewed consciousness.

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Freewheeling and anarchistic, Dada often generated a wide range of heterogeneous artistic reactions against earlier aesthetics. By contrast, Surrealism, headed by its so-called “Pope” André Breton, was frequently characterized by more unified, programmatic, or positive actions.

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Visual symbolism was important to the Nazis, and Hitler himself had been a painter, so it is not surprising that they dedicated significant resources promoting their ideals through art. So how was the decision made? How were "degenerate" and "Aryan" artworks selected? If you look at the works of art that were glorified and compare them to those that were attacked by the Nazis, the differences usually seem clear enough; experimental, personal, non-representational art was rejected, whilst conventionally "beautiful," stereotypically heroic art was revered. This seems like an obvious line to be taken by a totalitarian regime: everyone will find these artworks beautiful, and everyone will feel and think the same thing about them, without the risk of unwanted, random, personal, or unclear interpretations.

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contemporary art is art made today by living artists. As such, it reflects the complex issues that shape our diverse, global, and rapidly changing world.

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n the 1960s, many artists experimented with art that emphasized ideas over objects and materials traditionally associated with art making. In 1967, Sol LeWitt wrote in his essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” that “the idea itself, even if it is not made visual, is as much of a work of art as any finished product.” Conceptual artists used their work to question the notion of what art is, and to critique the underlying ideological structures of artistic production, distribution, and display