Art History (Period Styles)

Prehistoric

Paleolithic: Old stone age (ca. 30,000 - 9,000 BCE) No people depicted in most of Paleolithic age. The first sculptures and paintings antedate the invention of writing by tens of thousands of years. Paleolithic humans' decision to represent the world arou

Ancient Near East

Sumer: (ca. 3500 - 2332 BCE) The Sumerians founded the world's first city-states in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and invented writing in the 4th millennium BCE. They were also the first to build towering temple platforms, called zigg

Egypt

Old Kingdom: (ca. 2575 - 2134 BCE)
New Kingdom: (ca. 1550- 1070 BCE)
Amarna Period:

Aegean

Minoan: (ca 1700- 1200 BCE) The largest art form in the Minoan world was fresco painting on walls, usually illustrating palace rituals like bull-leaping. Vase painting also flourished. Sea motifs, for example, the octopus, were popular subjects. Minoan sc

Greek (Geometric)

Geometric: (ca. 900-600 bce) The human figure returned to Greek art in the form of bronze statuettes and simple silhouettes amid other abstract motifs on Geometric vases. Increasing contact with the civilizations of the Near East precipitated the so-calle

Greek (Archaic)

Archaic: (600- 480 bce) The first life-size stone statues appeared in Greece. The earliest kouroi emulated the frontal poses of Egyptian statues, but artists depicted the young men nude, the way Greek athletes competed at Olympia. During the course of the

Greek (Early Classical)

Transitional (early Classical): (480-450 bce) Sculptors revolutionized statuary by introducing contrapposto (weight shift) to their figures.

Greek (High Classical)

High Classical: (450-400 bce) Polykleitos developed a canon of proportions for the perfect statue. Iktinos and Kallikrates similarly applied mathematical formulas to temple design in the belief that beauty resulted from the use of harmonic numbers. Under

Greek (Late Classical)

Late Classical: (ca 400-323 bce) In the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, which ended in 404 BCE, Greek artists, while still adhering to the philosophy that humanity was the "measure of all things," began to focus more on the real world of appearances t

Greek (Hellensic)

Hellenistic: (323- 30 BCE) Extends from the death of Alexander until the death of Cleopatra, when Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire. The great cultural centers of the era were no longer the city-states of Archaic and Classical Greece but royal c