History of Painting in Three Easy Chapters (Met Tours Book 2)

Although silk was a somewhat expensive medium to paint upon in the past, the invention of paper during the 1st century AD by the Han court eunuch Cai Lun provided not only a cheap and widespread medium for writing, but also a cheap and widespread medium for painting making it more accessible to the public. Medieval Song dynasty painters such as Lin Tinggui and his Luohan Laundering [17] housed in the Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art of the 12th century are excellent examples of Buddhist ideas fused into classical Chinese artwork.

In the latter painting on silk image and description provided in the link , bald-headed Buddhist Luohan are depicted in a practical setting of washing clothes by a river. However, the painting itself is visually stunning, with the Luohan portrayed in rich detail and bright, opaque colors in contrast to a hazy, brown, and bland wooded environment.

Also, the tree tops are shrouded in swirling fog, providing the common "negative space" mentioned above in East Asian Art. The earliest surviving examples of Chinese painted artwork date to the Warring States Period — BC , with paintings on silk or tomb murals on rock, brick, or stone.

They were often in simplistic stylized format and in more-or-less rudimentary geometric patterns. They often depicted mythological creatures, domestic scenes, labor scenes, or palatial scenes filled with officials at court. Artwork during this period and the subsequent Qin Dynasty — BC and Han Dynasty BC — AD was made not as a means in and of itself or for higher personal expression; rather artwork was created to symbolize and honor funerary rites, representations of mythological deities or spirits of ancestors, etc. Paintings on silk of court officials and domestic scenes could be found during the Han Dynasty, along with scenes of men hunting on horseback or partaking in military parade.

There was also painting on three dimensional works of art like figurines and statues, such as the original-painted colors covering the soldier and horse statues of the Terracotta Army. During the social and cultural climate of the ancient Eastern Jin Dynasty — AD based at Nanjing in the south, painting became one of the official pastimes of Confucian -taught bureaucratic officials and aristocrats along with music played by the guqin zither, writing fanciful calligraphy , and writing and reciting of poetry.

Painting became a common form of artistic self-expression, and during this period painters at court or amongst elite social circuits were judged and ranked by their peers. The establishment of classical Chinese landscape painting is accredited largely to the Eastern Jin Dynasty artist Gu Kaizhi — AD , one of the most famous artists of Chinese history. Like the elongated scroll scenes of Kaizhi, Tang dynasty — AD Chinese artists like Wu Daozi painted vivid and highly detailed artwork on long horizontal handscrolls which were very popular during the Tang , such as his Eighty Seven Celestial People.

Painted artwork during the Tang period pertained the effects of an idealized landscape environment, with sparse numbers of objects, persons, or amount of activity, as well as monochromatic in nature example: There were also figures such as early Tang-era painter Zhan Ziqian , who painted superb landscape paintings that were well ahead of his day in portrayal of realism.

However, landscape art did not reach greater level of maturity and realism in general until the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period — AD. During this time, there were exceptional landscape painters like Dong Yuan refer to this article for an example of his artwork , and those who painted more vivid and realistic depictions of domestic scenes, like Gu Hongzhong and his Night Revels of Han Xizai. During the Chinese Song dynasty — AD , not only landscape art was improved upon, but portrait painting became more standardized and sophisticated than before for example, refer to Emperor Huizong of Song , and reached its classical age maturity during the Ming Dynasty — AD.

During the late 13th century and first half of the 14th century, Chinese under the Mongol -controlled Yuan Dynasty were not allowed to enter higher posts of government reserved for Mongols or other ethnic groups from Central Asia , and the Imperial examination was ceased for the time being. Many Confucian-educated Chinese who now lacked profession turned to the arts of painting and theatre instead, as the Yuan period became one of the most vibrant and abundant eras for Chinese artwork.

An example of such would be Qian Xuan — AD , who was an official of the Song dynasty, but out of patriotism, refused to serve the Yuan court and dedicated himself to painting. Within the palace, paintings cover an area of more than square meters, and hold mostly Daoist themes.

It was during the Song dynasty that painters would also gather in social clubs or meetings to discuss their art or others' artwork, the praising of which often led to persuasions to trade and sell precious works of art. However, there were also many harsh critics of others art as well, showing the difference in style and taste amongst different painters. In AD, the polymath scientist and statesman Shen Kuo once wrote of the artwork of one Li Cheng , who he criticized as follows:. Then there was Li Cheng, who when he depicted pavilions and lodges amidst mountains, storeyed buildings, pagodas and the like, always used to paint the eaves as seen from below.

His idea was that 'one should look upwards from underneath, just as a man standing on level ground and looking up at the eaves of a pagoda can see its rafters and its cantilever eave rafters'. This is all wrong. In general the proper way of painting a landscape is to see the small from the viewpoint of the large If one applies Li's method to the painting of real mountains, looking up at them from below, one can only see one profile at a time, and not the wealth of their multitudinous slopes and profiles, to say nothing of all that is going on in the valleys and canyons , and in the lanes and courtyards with their dwellings and houses.

If we stand to the east of a mountain its western parts would be on the vanishing boundary of far-off distance, and vice versa. Surely this could not be called a successful painting? Li did not understand the principle of 'seeing the small from the viewpoint of the large'. He was certainly marvelous at diminishing accurately heights and distances, but should one attach such importance to the angles and corners of buildings? Although high level of stylization, mystical appeal, and surreal elegance were often preferred over realism such as in shan shui style , beginning with the medieval Song dynasty there were many Chinese painters then and afterwards who depicted scenes of nature that were vividly real.

Later Ming Dynasty artists would take after this Song dynasty emphasis for intricate detail and realism on objects in nature, especially in depictions of animals such as ducks, swans, sparrows, tigers, etc. There were many renowned Ming Dynasty artists; Qiu Ying is an excellent example of a paramount Ming era painter famous even in his own day , utilizing in his artwork domestic scenes, bustling palatial scenes, and nature scenes of river valleys and steeped mountains shrouded in mist and swirling clouds.

During the Ming Dynasty there were also different and rivaling schools of art associated with painting, such as the Wu School and the Zhe School. Classical Chinese painting continued on into the early modern Qing Dynasty , with highly realistic portrait paintings like seen in the late Ming Dynasty of the early 17th century. The portraits of Kangxi Emperor , Yongzheng Emperor , and Qianlong Emperor are excellent examples of realistic Chinese portrait painting.

During the Qianlong reign period and the continuing 19th century, European Baroque styles of painting had noticeable influence on Chinese portrait paintings, especially with painted visual effects of lighting and shading. Likewise, East Asian paintings and other works of art such as porcelain and lacquerware were highly prized in Europe since initial contact in the 16th century. As with Japanese arts in general, Japanese painting developed through a long history of synthesis and competition between native Japanese aesthetics and adaptation of imported ideas.

Ukiyo-e , or "pictures of the floating world," is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints or " woodcuts " and paintings produced between the 17th and 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, theater, and courtesan districts. It is the main artistic genre of Japanese woodblock printing. Japanese printmaking, especially from the Edo period , exerted enormous influence on French painting over the 19th century.

It wasn't until the Joseon dynasty that Confucian themes began to take root in Korean paintings, used in harmony with indigenous aspects. The history of Korean painting has been characterized by the use monochromatic works of black brushwork, often on mulberry paper or silk.

This style is evident in "Min-Hwa", or colorful folk art, tomb paintings, and ritual and festival arts, both of which incorporated an extensive use of colour. Elephant and cub out of the stable of the Moghul ruler, 17th century. A man with children, Punjab style, Rama and Sita in the Forest , Punjab style, Indian paintings historically revolved around the religious deities and kings.

Indian art is a collective term for several different schools of art that existed in the Indian subcontinent. The paintings varied from large frescoes of Ajanta to the intricate Mughal miniature paintings to the metal embellished works from the Tanjore school. The paintings from the Gandhar — Taxila are influenced by the Persian works in the west. The eastern style of painting was mostly developed around the Nalanda school of art.

The works are mostly inspired by various scenes from Indian mythology. The earliest Indian paintings were the rock paintings of prehistoric times, the petroglyphs as found in places like the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka , and some of them are older than BC. Such works continued and after several millennia, in the 7th century, carved pillars of Ajanta , Maharashtra state present a fine example of Indian paintings, and the colors, mostly various shades of red and orange, were derived from minerals.

Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra, India are rock-cut cave monuments dating back to the 2nd century BCE and containing paintings and sculpture considered to be masterpieces of both Buddhist religious art [24] and universal pictorial art. Madhubani painting is a style of Indian painting, practiced in the Mithila region of Bihar state, India.

The origins of Madhubani painting are shrouded in antiquity. Rajput painting , a style of Indian painting , evolved and flourished, during the 18th century, in the royal courts of Rajputana , India. Each Rajput kingdom evolved a distinct style, but with certain common features. Rajput paintings depict a number of themes, events of epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, Krishna's life, beautiful landscapes, and humans.

Miniatures were the preferred medium of Rajput painting, but several manuscripts also contain Rajput paintings, and paintings were even done on the walls of palaces, inner chambers of the forts, havelies, particularly, the havelis of Shekhawait. The colors extracted from certain minerals, plant sources, conch shells, and were even derived by processing precious stones, gold and silver were used. The preparation of desired colors was a lengthy process, sometimes taking weeks. Brushes used were very fine. Tanjore painting is an important form of classical South Indian painting native to the town of Tanjore in Tamil Nadu.

The art form dates back to the early 9th century, a period dominated by the Chola rulers, who encouraged art and literature. These paintings are known for their elegance, rich colors, and attention to detail. The themes for most of these paintings are Hindu Gods and Goddesses and scenes from Hindu mythology. In modern times, these paintings have become a much sought after souvenir during festive occasions in South India. The process of making a Tanjore painting involves many stages.

The first stage involves the making of the preliminary sketch of the image on the base. The base consists of a cloth pasted over a wooden base. Then chalk powder or zinc oxide is mixed with water-soluble adhesive and applied on the base. To make the base smoother, a mild abrasive is sometimes used.

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After the drawing is made, decoration of the jewellery and the apparels in the image is done with semi-precious stones. Laces or threads are also used to decorate the jewellery. On top of this, the gold foils are pasted. Finally, dyes are used to add colors to the figures in the paintings. During British rule in India, the crown found that Madras had some of the most talented and intellectual artistic minds in the world. As the British had also established a huge settlement in and around Madras, Georgetown was chosen to establish an institute that would cater to the artistic expectations of the royal family in London.

This has come to be known as the Madras School. At first traditional artists were employed to produce exquisite varieties of furniture, metal work, and curios and their work was sent to the royal palaces of the Queen. Unlike the Bengal School where 'copying' is the norm of teaching, the Madras School flourishes on 'creating' new styles, arguments and trends. The Bengal school of art was an influential style of art that flourished in India during the British Raj in the early 20th century. It was associated with Indian nationalism, but was also promoted and supported by many British arts administrators.

The Bengal School arose as an avant garde and nationalist movement reacting against the academic art styles previously promoted in India, both by Indian artists such as Raja Ravi Varma and in British art schools. Following the widespread influence of Indian spiritual ideas in the West, the British art teacher Ernest Binfield Havel attempted to reform the teaching methods at the Calcutta School of Art by encouraging students to imitate Mughal miniatures.

This caused immense controversy, leading to a strike by students and complaints from the local press, including from nationalists who considered it to be a retrogressive move. Havel was supported by the artist Abanindranath Tagore , a nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore painted a number of works influenced by Mughal art, a style that he and Havel believed to be expressive of India's distinct spiritual qualities, as opposed to the "materialism" of the West. Tagore's best-known painting, Bharat Mata Mother India , depicted a young woman, portrayed with four arms in the manner of Hindu deities, holding objects symbolic of India's national aspirations.

Tagore later attempted to develop links with Japanese artists as part of an aspiration to construct a pan-Asianist model of art. The Bengal School's influence in India declined with the spread of modernist ideas in the s. In the post-independence period, Indian artists showed more adaptability as they borrowed freely from european styles and amalgamated them freely with the Indian motifs to new forms of art.

While artists like Francis Newton Souza and Tyeb Mehta were more western in their approach, there were others like Ganesh Pyne and Maqbool Fida Husain who developed thoroughly indigenous styles of work. Today after the process of liberalization of market in India, the artists are experiencing more exposure to the international art-scene which is helping them in emerging with newer forms of art which were hitherto not seen in India.

Jitish Kallat had shot to fame in the late s with his paintings which were both modern and beyond the scope of generic definition. However, while artists in India in the new century are trying out new styles, themes and metaphors, it would not have been possible to get such quick recognition without the aid of the business houses which are now entering the art field like they had never before.

Amrita Sher-Gil was an Indian painter, sometimes known as India's Frida Kahlo , [26] and today considered an important woman painter of 20th-century India, whose legacy stands at par with that of the Masters of Bengal Renaissance ; [27] [28] she is also the 'most expensive' woman painter of India.

Today, she is amongst Nine Masters , whose work was declared as art treasures by The Archaeological Survey of India , in and , [30] and over of her paintings are now displayed at National Gallery of Modern Art , New Delhi. During the colonial era, Western influences started to make an impact on Indian art.

Some artists developed a style that used Western ideas of composition, perspective and realism to illustrate Indian themes. Others, like Jamini Roy , consciously drew inspiration from folk art. By the time of Independence in , several schools of art in India provided access to modern techniques and ideas. Galleries were established to showcase these artists.

Modern Indian art typically shows the influence of Western styles, but is often inspired by Indian themes and images. Major artists are beginning to gain international recognition, initially among the Indian diaspora, but also among non-Indian audiences. The Progressive Artists' Group , established shortly after India became independent in , was intended to establish new ways of expressing India in the post-colonial era. The founders were six eminent artists — K. Souza , though the group was dissolved in , it was profoundly influential in changing the idiom of Indian art.

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Almost all India's major artists in the s were associated with the group. They have become the icons of modern Indian art. Art historians like Prof. Rai Anand Krishna have also referred to those works of modern artistes that reflect Indian ethos. Geeta Vadhera has had acclaim in translating complex, Indian spiritual themes onto canvas like Sufi thought, the Upanishads and the Bhagwad Geeta. Indian art got a boost with the economic liberalization of the country since the early s. Artists from various fields now started bringing in varied styles of work. In post-liberalization India, many artists have established themselves in the international art market like the abstract painter Natvar Bhavsar , figurative artist Devajyoti Ray and sculptor Anish Kapoor whose mammoth postminimalist artworks have acquired attention for their sheer size.

Filipino painting as a whole can be seen as an amalgamation of many cultural influences, though it tends to be more Western in its current form with Eastern roots. Early Filipino painting can be found in red slip clay mixed with water designs embellished on the ritual pottery of the Philippines such as the acclaimed Manunggul Jar. Early Filipinos started making pottery before their Cambodian neighbors and at about the same time as the Thais as part of what appears to be a widespread Ice Age development of pottery technology.

Further evidences of painting are manifested in the tattoo tradition of early Filipinos, whom the Portuguese explorer referred to as Pintados or the 'Painted People' of the Visayas. Filipinos began creating paintings in the European tradition during the 17th-century Spanish period. Most of the paintings and sculptures between the 19th, and 20th century produced a mixture of religious, political, and landscape art works, with qualities of sweetness, dark, and light.

Artist such as Fernando Amorsolo used post-modernism to produce paintings that illustrated Philippine culture, nature, and harmony. Juan Luna , The Death of Cleopatra , Juan Luna , Spoliarium , c. Ancient Egypt , a civilization with very strong traditions of architecture and sculpture both originally painted in bright colours also had many mural paintings in temples and buildings, and painted illustrations on papyrus manuscripts. Egyptian wall painting and decorative painting is often graphic, sometimes more symbolic than realistic. Egyptian painting depicts figures in bold outline and flat silhouette , in which symmetry is a constant characteristic.

Egyptian painting has close connection with its written language — called Egyptian hieroglyphs. Painted symbols are found amongst the first forms of written language. The Egyptians also painted on linen , remnants of which survive today. Ancient Egyptian paintings survived due to the extremely dry climate. The ancient Egyptians created paintings to make the afterlife of the deceased a pleasant place. The themes included journey through the afterworld or their protective deities introducing the deceased to the gods of the underworld.

Some tomb paintings show activities that the deceased were involved in when they were alive and wished to carry on doing for eternity. In the New Kingdom and later, the Book of the Dead was buried with the entombed person. It was considered important for an introduction to the afterlife. Sennedjem plows his fields with a pair of oxen , c. Ancient Egypt , The Goddess Isis , wall painting, c. Ancient Egypt , Queen Nefertari. Knossos , Minoan civilization , Bronze Age Crete. Pitsa panels , one of the few surviving panel paintings from Archaic Greece , c.

Fresco of an ancient Macedonian soldier thorakitai wearing chainmail armor and bearing a thureos shield, 3rd century BC. Roman art , Pompeii , Villa of the Mysteries , c. Roman art showing Hercules and Telephus. Roman art , Villa Boscoreale frescos, c. Roman art , Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt. Cupids playing with a lyre , Roman fresco from Herculaneum. To the north of Egypt was the Minoan civilization centered on the island of Crete. The wall paintings found in the palace of Knossos are similar to that of the Egyptians but much more free in style.

Ancient Greek art during the Greek Dark Age became far less complex, but the renewal of Greek civilization throughout the Mediterranean during Archaic Greece brought about new forms of Greek art with the Orientalizing style. Ancient Greece had skilled painters, sculptors though both endeavours were regarded as mere manual labour at the time , and architects.

The Parthenon is an example of their architecture that has lasted to modern days. Greek marble sculpture is often described as the highest form of Classical art. Painting on pottery of Ancient Greece and ceramics gives a particularly informative glimpse into the way society in Ancient Greece functioned. Black-figure vase painting and Red-figure vase painting gives many surviving examples of what Greek painting was. Some famous Greek painters on wooden panels who are mentioned in texts are Apelles , Zeuxis and Parrhasius , however no examples of Ancient Greek panel painting survive, only written descriptions by their contemporaries or later Romans.

According to Pliny the Elder , the realism of his paintings was such that birds tried to eat the painted grapes. Apelles is described as the greatest painter of Antiquity for perfect technique in drawing, brilliant color and modeling.

Roman art was influenced by Greece and can in part be taken as a descendant of ancient Greek painting. However, Roman painting does have important unique characteristics. Surviving Roman paintings include wall paintings and frescoes , many from villas in Campania , in Southern Italy at sites such as Pompeii and Herculaneum. Although these were neither of the best period nor the highest quality, they are impressive in themselves, and give an idea of the quality that the finest ancient work must have had. A very small number of miniatures from Late Antique illustrated books also survive, and a rather larger number of copies of them from the Early Medieval period.

The Capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade , c. Bonaventura Berlinghieri , St Francis of Assisi , Cathedral of the Archangel. Rogier van der Weyden , c. Rogier van der Weyden , St Ivo c. The rise of Christianity imparted a different spirit and aim to painting styles. Byzantine art , once its style was established by the 6th century, placed great emphasis on retaining traditional iconography and style, and gradually evolved during the thousand years of the Byzantine Empire and the living traditions of Greek and Russian Orthodox icon -painting.

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Byzantine painting has a hieratic feeling and icons were and still are seen as a representation of divine revelation. There were many frescos , but fewer of these have survived than mosaics. Byzantine art has been compared to contemporary abstraction , in its flatness and highly stylised depictions of figures and landscape. Some periods of Byzantine art, especially the so-called Macedonian art of around the 10th century, are more flexible in approach. Frescos of the Palaeologian Renaissance of the early 14th century survive in the Chora Church in Istanbul.

In post-Antique Catholic Europe the first distinctive artistic style to emerge that included painting was the Insular art of the British Isles, where the only surviving examples are miniatures in Illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells. Carolingian and Ottonian art also survives mostly in manuscripts, although some wall-painting remain, and more are documented.

The art of this period combines Insular and "barbarian" influences with a strong Byzantine influence and an aspiration to recover classical monumentality and poise. Walls of Romanesque and Gothic churches were decorated with frescoes as well as sculpture and many of the few remaining murals have great intensity, and combine the decorative energy of Insular art with a new monumentality in the treatment of figures. Far more miniatures in Illuminated manuscripts survive from the period, showing the same characteristics, which continue into the Gothic period.

Panel painting becomes more common during the Romanesque period, under the heavy influence of Byzantine icons. Towards the middle of the 13th century, Medieval art and Gothic painting became more realistic, with the beginnings of interest in the depiction of volume and perspective in Italy with Cimabue and then his pupil Giotto. From Giotto on, the treatment of composition by the best painters also became much more free and innovative.

They are considered to be the two great medieval masters of painting in western culture. Cimabue, within the Byzantine tradition, used a more realistic and dramatic approach to his art. His pupil, Giotto, took these innovations to a higher level which in turn set the foundations for the western painting tradition.

Both artists were pioneers in the move towards naturalism. Churches were built with more and more windows and the use of colorful stained glass become a staple in decoration. One of the most famous examples of this is found in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. By the 14th century Western societies were both richer and more cultivated and painters found new patrons in the nobility and even the bourgeoisie.

Illuminated manuscripts took on a new character and slim, fashionably dressed court women were shown in their landscapes. This style soon became known as International style and tempera panel paintings and altarpieces gained importance. Hieronymus Bosch , c. Piero della Francesca , — Lucas Cranach the Elder , c. Pieter Bruegel , Hans Holbein the Younger , Jacopo Tintoretto , The Renaissance French for 'rebirth' , a cultural movement roughly spanning the 14th through the midth century, heralded the study of classical sources, as well as advances in science which profoundly influenced European intellectual and artistic life.

In the Low Countries , especially in modern day Flanders , a new way of painting was established in the beginning of the 15th century. In the footsteps of the developments made in the illumination of manuscripts , especially by the Limbourg Brothers , artists became fascinated by the tangible in the visible world and began representing objects in an extremely naturalistic way. The medium of oil paint was already present in the work of Melchior Broederlam , but painters like Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin brought its use to new heights and employed it to represent the naturalism they were aiming for.

With this new medium the painters of this period were capable of creating richer colors with a deep intense tonality. The illusion of glowing light with a porcelain-like finish characterized Early Netherlandish painting and was a major difference to the matte surface of tempera paint used in Italy. The most important artist of this time was Jan van Eyck , whose work ranks among the finest made by artists who are now known as Early Netherlandish painters or Flemish Primitives since most artists were active in cities in modern day Flanders.

Another important painter of this period was Rogier van der Weyden , whose compositions stressed human emotion and drama, demonstrated for instance in his Descent from the Cross , which ranks among the most famous works of the 15th century and was the most influential Netherlandish painting of Christ's crucifixion.

Other important artists from this period are Hugo van der Goes whose work was highly influential in Italy , Dieric Bouts who was among the first northern painters to demonstrate the use of a single vanishing point , [37] Petrus Christus , Hans Memling and Gerard David. In Italy, the art of Classical antiquity inspired a style of painting that emphasized the ideal.

Artists such as Paolo Uccello , Masaccio , Fra Angelico , Piero della Francesca , Andrea Mantegna , Filippo Lippi , Sandro Botticelli , Leonardo da Vinci , Michelangelo Buonarroti , and Raphael took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective , the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques.

A somewhat more naturalistic style emerged in Venice. Painters of the Venetian school , such as Giovanni Bellini , Giorgione , Titian , Tintoretto , and Veronese , were less concerned with precision in their drawing than with the richness of color and unity of effect that could be achieved by a more spontaneous approach to painting. Genre painting became a popular idiom amongst the Northern painters like Pieter Bruegel.

Renaissance painting reflects the revolution of ideas and science astronomy , geography that occurred in this period, the Reformation , and the invention of the printing press. With the development of easel painting in the Renaissance, painting gained independence from architecture. Easel paintings—movable pictures which could be hung easily on walls—became a popular alternative to paintings fixed to furniture, walls or other structures.

Following centuries dominated by religious imagery, secular subject matter slowly returned to Western painting. Artists included visions of the world around them, or the products of their own imaginations in their paintings.

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Those who could afford the expense could become patrons and commission portraits of themselves or their family. The High Renaissance gave rise to a stylized art known as Mannerism. In place of the balanced compositions and rational approach to perspective that characterized art at the dawn of the 16th century, the Mannerists sought instability, artifice, and doubt. The unperturbed faces and gestures of Piero della Francesca and the calm Virgins of Raphael are replaced by the troubled expressions of Pontormo and the emotional intensity of El Greco. Restless and unstable compositions, often extreme or disjunctive effects of perspective, and stylized poses are characteristic of Italian Mannerists such as Tintoretto , Pontormo, and Bronzino , and appeared later in the work of Northern Mannerists such as Hendrick Goltzius , Bartholomeus Spranger , and Joachim Wtewael.

Artemisia Gentileschi , — Giovanni Battista Tiepolo , c. Antoine Watteau , c. Maurice Quentin de La Tour , c. Thomas Gainsborough , c. Baroque painting is associated with the Baroque cultural movement , a movement often identified with Absolutism and the Counter Reformation or Catholic Revival; [38] [39] the existence of important Baroque painting in non-absolutist and Protestant states also, however, underscores its popularity, as the style spread throughout Western Europe.

Baroque painting is characterized by great drama, rich, deep color, and intense light and dark shadows. Baroque art was meant to evoke emotion and passion instead of the calm rationality that had been prized during the Renaissance. During the period beginning around and continuing throughout the 17th century, painting is characterized as Baroque. Caravaggio is an heir of the humanist painting of the High Renaissance. His realistic approach to the human figure, painted directly from life and dramatically spotlit against a dark background, shocked his contemporaries and opened a new chapter in the history of painting.

Baroque painting often dramatizes scenes using light effects; this can be seen in works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Le Nain , La Tour , and Jusepe de Ribera. Illusionistic church ceiling frescoes by Pietro da Cortona seemed to open to the sky. A much quieter type of Baroque emerged in the Dutch Republic , where easel paintings of everyday subjects were popular with middle-class collectors, and many painters became specialists in genre , others in landscape or seascape or still life. Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch , and Pieter de Hooch brought great technical refinement to the painting of domestic scenes, as did Willem Claesz.

Heda to still life. In contrast, Rembrandt excelled in painting every type of subject, and developed an individual painterly style in which the chiaroscuro and dark backgrounds derived from Caravaggio and the Utrecht Caravaggists lose their theatrical quality. During the 18th century, Rococo followed as a lighter extension of Baroque, often frivolous and erotic.

Rococo developed first in the decorative arts and interior design in France. Louis XV 's succession brought a change in the court artists and general artistic fashion. Rococo still maintained the Baroque taste for complex forms and intricate patterns, but by this point, it had begun to integrate a variety of diverse characteristics, including a taste for Oriental designs and asymmetric compositions.

The Rococo style spread with French artists and engraved publications. It was readily received in the Catholic parts of Germany, Bohemia , and Austria , where it was merged with the lively German Baroque traditions. German Rococo was applied with enthusiasm to churches and palaces, particularly in the south, while Frederician Rococo developed in the Kingdom of Prussia. Portraiture was an important component of painting in all countries, but especially in England, where the leaders were William Hogarth , in a blunt realist style, and Francis Hayman , Angelica Kauffman who was Swiss , Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds in more flattering styles influenced by Anthony van Dyck.

La Tour specialized in pastel painting, which became a popular medium during this period. William Hogarth helped develop a theoretical foundation for Rococo beauty. Though not intentionally referencing the movement, he argued in his Analysis of Beauty that the undulating lines and S-curves prominent in Rococo were the basis for grace and beauty in art or nature unlike the straight line or the circle in Classicism.

Blondel decried the "ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants" in contemporary interiors. By , Rococo had passed out of fashion in France, replaced by the order and seriousness of Neoclassical artists like Jacques-Louis David. John Singleton Copley Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres Francisco de Goya Caspar David Friedrich c. After Rococo there arose in the late 18th century, in architecture, and then in painting severe neo-classicism , best represented by such artists as David and his heir Ingres.

Ingres' work already contains much of the sensuality, but none of the spontaneity, that was to characterize Romanticism. This movement turned its attention toward landscape and nature as well as the human figure and the supremacy of natural order above mankind's will. There is a pantheist philosophy see Spinoza and Hegel within this conception that opposes Enlightenment ideals by seeing mankind's destiny in a more tragic or pessimistic light.

The idea that human beings are not above the forces of Nature is in contradiction to Ancient Greek and Renaissance ideals where mankind was above all things and owned his fate. This thinking led romantic artists to depict the sublime , ruined churches, shipwrecks, massacres and madness. By the midth-century painters became liberated from the demands of their patronage to only depict scenes from religion, mythology, portraiture or history.

The idea "art for art's sake" began to find expression in the work of painters like Francisco de Goya, John Constable, and J. Romantic painters saw landscape painting as an important genre to express the vanity of mankind in opposition to the grandeur of nature. Until then, landscape painting wasn't considered the most important genre for painters like portraiture or history painting. But painters like J. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich managed to elevate landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.

Luminism was a movement in American landscape painting related to the Hudson River School. Boudin was also an important influence on the young Claude Monet , whom in he introduced to Plein air painting. A major force in the turn towards Realism at mid-century was Gustave Courbet. They eschewed allegory and narrative in favor of individualized responses to the modern world, sometimes painted with little or no preparatory study, relying on deftness of drawing and a highly chromatic pallette.

Manet, Degas, Renoir, Morisot, and Cassatt concentrated primarily on the human subject. Both Manet and Degas reinterpreted classical figurative canons within contemporary situations; in Manet's case the re-imaginings met with hostile public reception. Renoir, Morisot, and Cassatt turned to domestic life for inspiration, with Renoir focusing on the female nude. Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley used the landscape as their primary motif, the transience of light and weather playing a major role in their work.

While Sisley most closely adhered to the original principals of the Impressionist perception of the landscape, Monet sought challenges in increasingly chromatic and changeable conditions, culminating in his series of monumental works of Water Lilies painted in Giverny. Pissarro adopted some of the experiments of Post-Impressionism. The spell of Impressionism was felt throughout the world, including in the United States, where it became integral to the painting of American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam , John Twachtman , and Theodore Robinson ; and in Australia where painters of the Heidelberg School such as Arthur Streeton , Frederick McCubbin and Charles Conder painted en plein air and were particularly interested in the Australian landscape and light.

It also exerted influence on painters who were not primarily Impressionistic in theory, like the portrait and landscape painter John Singer Sargent. At the same time in America at the turn of the 20th century there existed a native and nearly insular realism, as richly embodied in the figurative work of Thomas Eakins , the Ashcan School , and the landscapes and seascapes of Winslow Homer , all of whose paintings were deeply invested in the solidity of natural forms. The visionary landscape, a motive largely dependent on the ambiguity of the nocturne, found its advocates in Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Albert Blakelock.

In the late 19th century there also were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters whose works resonated with younger artists of the 20th century, especially with the Fauvists and the Surrealists. Symbolist painters mined mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul, seeking evocative paintings that brought to mind a static world of silence. The symbols used in Symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, the Symbolist painters influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau movement and Les Nabis.

At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Henri Matisse , Fauvism. Pablo Picasso , Proto-Cubism. Georges Braque , Analytic Cubism. Henri Rousseau Primitive Surrealism. Henri Matisse 's second version of The Dance signifies a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions.

Les Fauves French for The Wild Beasts were earlyth-century painters, experimenting with freedom of expression through color. The name was given, humorously and not as a compliment, to the group by art critic Louis Vauxcelles. Fauvism was a short-lived and loose grouping of earlyth-century artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities, and the imaginative use of deep color over the representational values. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine ; these red leaves?

Ultimately Matisse became the yang to Picasso 's yin in the 20th century. Matisse was seen as the leader of the movement, due to his seniority in age and prior self-establishment in the academic art world. His portrait of Mme. Matisse The Green Line , above , caused a sensation in Paris when it was first exhibited. He said he wanted to create art to delight; art as a decoration was his purpose and it can be said that his use of bright colors tries to maintain serenity of composition. Masters like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard continued developing their narrative styles independent of any movement throughout the 20th century.

By Fauvism no longer was a shocking new movement, soon it was replaced by Cubism on the critics' radar screen as the latest new development in Contemporary Art of the time. In Appolinaire , commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable. During the years between and the end of World War I and after the heyday of cubism , several movements emerged in Paris. Through his brother he met Pierre Laprade a member of the jury at the Salon d'Automne, where he exhibited three of his dreamlike works: His compelling and mysterious paintings are considered instrumental to the early beginnings of Surrealism.

Henri Matisse, , Woman with a Hat , Fauvism. Jean Metzinger , c. Gustav Klimt , expressionism , — Pablo Picasso , , Dryad , Proto-Cubism. Marc Chagall , expressionism and surrealism. Marcel Duchamp , —, Cubism and Dada. Franz Marc , Der Blaue Reiter. Robert Delaunay , , Orphism. Wassily Kandinsky , birth of abstract art. Amedeo Modigliani , Portrait of Soutine , example of Expressionism. Modern painting influenced all the visual arts, from Modernist architecture and design, to avant-garde film, theatre and modern dance and became an experimental laboratory for the expression of visual experience, from photography and concrete poetry to advertising art and fashion.

Wassily Kandinsky a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist, one of the most famous 20th-century artists is generally considered the first important painter of modern abstract art. As an early Modernist, in search of new modes of visual expression, and spiritual expression, he theorized as did contemporary occultists and theosophists , that pure visual abstraction had corollary vibrations with sound and music. They posited that pure abstraction could express pure spirituality.

His earliest abstractions were generally titled as the example in the above gallery Composition VII , making connection to the work of the composers of music. Kandinsky included many of his theories about abstract art in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Robert Delaunay was a French artist who is associated with Orphism , reminiscent of a link between pure abstraction and cubism.

His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key contributions to abstract painting refer to his bold use of color, and a clear love of experimentation of both depth and tone. At the invitation of Wassily Kandinsky , Delaunay and his wife the artist Sonia Delaunay , joined The Blue Rider Der Blaue Reiter , a Munich -based group of abstract artists, in , and his art took a turn to the abstract.

Other major pioneers of early abstraction include Russian painter Kasimir Malevich , who after the Russian Revolution in , and after pressure from the Stalinist regime in returned to painting imagery and Peasants and Workers in the field , and Swiss painter Paul Klee whose masterful color experiments made him an important pioneer of abstract painting at the Bauhaus. Expressionism and Symbolism are broad rubrics that involve several important and related movements in 20th-century painting that dominated much of the avant-garde art being made in Western, Eastern and Northern Europe.

Expressionist artists are related to both Surrealism and Symbolism and are each uniquely and somewhat eccentrically personal. Artists as interesting and diverse as Marc Chagall , whose painting I and the Village , above tells an autobiographical story that examines the relationship between the artist and his origins, with a lexicon of artistic Symbolism. Although Alberto Giacometti is primarily thought of as an intense Surrealist sculptor, he made intense expressionist paintings as well.

Piet Mondrian , , early De Stijl. Kasimir Malevich , Suprematism. Stanton MacDonald-Wright , Synchromism. Piet Mondrian 's art was also related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In he became interested in the theosophical movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the late 19th century. Blavatsky believed that it was possible to attain a knowledge of nature more profound than that provided by empirical means, and much of Mondrian's work for the rest of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge.

De Stijl also known as neoplasticism , was a Dutch artistic movement founded in The term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from to founded in the Netherlands. De Stijl is also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg propagating the group's theories. The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the group's work is known as neoplasticism — the new plastic art or Nieuwe Beelding in Dutch. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order.

They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white. Indeed, according to the Tate Gallery 's online article on neoplasticism, Mondrian himself sets forth these delimitations in his essay "Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art".

On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour. De Stijl movement was influenced by Cubist painting as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about "ideal" geometric forms such as the "perfect straight line" in the neoplatonic philosophy of mathematician M. The works of De Stijl would influence the Bauhaus style and the international style of architecture as well as clothing and interior design.

However, it did not follow the general guidelines of an "ism" Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism , nor did it adhere to the principles of art schools like Bauhaus; it was a collective project, a joint enterprise. Kurt Schwitters , , painted collage , Dada. Marcel Duchamp , came to international prominence in the wake of his notorious success at the New York City Armory Show in , soon after he denounced artmaking for chess.

The Large Glass pushed the art of painting to radical new limits being part painting, part collage, part construction. Duchamp became closely associated with the Dada movement that began in neutral Zurich , Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from to The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature poetry, art manifestoes, art theory , theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti war politic through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.

Duchamp and several Dadaists are also associated with Surrealism, the movement that dominated European painting in the s and s. The Surrealist movement in painting became synonymous with the avant-garde and which featured artists whose works varied from the abstract to the super-realist. With works on paper like Machine Turn Quickly , above Francis Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through in Zurich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art.

Throughout the s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions. Surrealist groups in Japan, and especially in Latin America, the Caribbean and in Mexico produced innovative and original works. Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: Evocations of time and its compelling mystery and absurdity.

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The characteristics of this style — a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological — came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modernist period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality. Max Ernst whose painting Murdering Airplane , studied philosophy and psychology in Bonn and was interested in the alternative realities experienced by the insane.

His paintings may have been inspired by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud 's study of the delusions of a paranoiac, Daniel Paul Schreber. Freud identified Schreber's fantasy of becoming a woman as a castration complex. The central image of two pairs of legs refers to Schreber's hermaphroditic desires. Ernst's inscription on the back of the painting reads: The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance one another. Egon Schiele , Symbolism and Expressionism Amedeo Modigliani Symbolism and Expressionism Stuart Davis , American Modernism Chaim Soutine , Expressionism , c.

Later members included Max Pechstein , Otto Mueller and others. The group was one of the seminal ones, which in due course had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the 20th century and created the style of Expressionism. Wassily Kandinsky , Franz Marc , August Macke , Alexej von Jawlensky , whose psychically expressive painting of the Russian dancer Portrait of Alexander Sakharoff , is in the gallery above, Marianne von Werefkin , Lyonel Feininger and others founded the Der Blaue Reiter group in response to the rejection of Kandinsky's painting Last Judgement from an exhibition.

Der Blaue Reiter lacked a central artistic manifesto, but was centered around Kandinsky and Marc. The name of the movement comes from a painting by Kandinsky created in It is also claimed that the name could have derived from Marc's enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky's love of the colour blue. For Kandinsky, blue is the colour of spirituality: George Grosz , , Neue Sachlichkeit. Thomas Hart Benton , Regionalism. George Bellows , , American realism. While in America American Scene painting and the social realism and regionalism movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world.

Frida Kahlo 's Symbolist works also relate strongly to Surrealism and to the Magic Realism movement in literature. The psychological drama in many of Kahlo's self portraits above underscore the vitality and relevance of her paintings to artists in the 21st century. American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood from Portraying a pitchfork -holding farmer and a younger woman in front of a house of Carpenter Gothic style, it is one of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art.

Art critics had favorable opinions about the painting, like Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley , they assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. When his patron Nelson Rockefeller discovered that the mural included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller's staff. The film Cradle Will Rock includes a dramatization of the controversy. Frida Kahlo Rivera's wife's works are often characterized by their stark portrayals of pain.

Of her paintings 55 are self-portraits , which frequently incorporate symbolic portrayals of her physical and psychological wounds. Kahlo was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is apparent in her paintings' bright colors and dramatic symbolism. Christian and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work as well; she combined elements of the classic religious Mexican tradition—which were often bloody and violent—with surrealist renderings. While her paintings are not overtly Christian — she was, after all, an avowed communist — they certainly contain elements of the macabre Mexican Christian style of religious paintings.

Political activism was an important piece of David Siqueiros ' life, and frequently inspired him to set aside his artistic career. His art was deeply rooted in the Mexican Revolution , a violent and chaotic period in Mexican history in which various social and political factions fought for recognition and power. The period from the s to the s is known as the Mexican Renaissance, and Siqueiros was active in the attempt to create an art that was at once Mexican and universal. He briefly gave up painting to focus on organizing miners in Jalisco. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , —, German Expressionism.

Wassily Kandinsky Composition X , Geometric abstraction. During the s radical leftist politics characterized many of the artists connected to Surrealism , including Pablo Picasso. The Germans were attacking to support the efforts of Francisco Franco to overthrow the Basque Government and the Spanish Republican government.

The town was devastated, though the Biscayan assembly and the Oak of Gernika survived. Pablo Picasso painted his mural sized Guernica to commemorate the horrors of the bombing. In its final form, Guernica is an immense black and white, 3. The mural presents a scene of death, violence, brutality, suffering, and helplessness without portraying their immediate causes. The choice to paint in black and white contrasts with the intensity of the scene depicted and invokes the immediacy of a newspaper photograph.

The painting was first exhibited in Paris in , then Scandinavia , then London in and finally in at Picasso's request the painting was sent to the United States in an extended loan for safekeeping at MoMA. The painting went on a tour of museums throughout the USA until its final return to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where it was exhibited for nearly thirty years. Finally in accord with Pablo Picasso 's wish to give the painting to the people of Spain as a gift, it was sent to Spain in Nighthawks is a painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night.

It is not only Hopper's most famous painting, but one of the most recognizable in American art. It is currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Second, philosophers and artists alike were convinced that mathematics was the true essence of the physical world and that the entire universe, including the arts, could be explained in geometric terms.

In , the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi and his friend Leon Battista Alberti demonstrated the geometrical method of applying perspective in Florence, using similar triangles as formulated by Euclid, to find the apparent height of distant objects. The painter Piero della Francesca c. His work on geometry influenced later mathematicians and artists including Luca Pacioli in his De Divina Proportione and Leonardo da Vinci.

Piero studied classical mathematics and the works of Archimedes. Linear perspective was just being introduced into the artistic world. Alberti explained in his De pictura: In De Prospectiva Pingendi , Piero transforms his empirical observations of the way aspects of a figure change with point of view into mathematical proofs. His treatise starts in the vein of Euclid: The artist David Hockney argued in his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters that artists started using a camera lucida from the s, resulting in a sudden change in precision and realism, and that this practice was continued by major artists including Ingres , Van Eyck , and Caravaggio.

In , Luca Pacioli c. Leonardo da Vinci — illustrated the text with woodcuts of regular solids while he studied under Pacioli in the s. Leonardo's drawings are probably the first illustrations of skeletonic solids. As early as the 15th century, curvilinear perspective found its way into paintings by artists interested in image distortions.

Jan van Eyck 's Arnolfini Portrait contains a convex mirror with reflections of the people in the scene, [36] while Parmigianino 's Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror , c. Three-dimensional space can be represented convincingly in art, as in technical drawing , by means other than perspective. Oblique projections , including cavalier perspective used by French military artists to depict fortifications in the 18th century , were used continuously and ubiquitously by Chinese artists from the first or second centuries until the 18th century.

The Chinese acquired the technique from India, which acquired it from Ancient Rome. Oblique projection is seen in Japanese art, such as in the Ukiyo-e paintings of Torii Kiyonaga — Woodcut from Luca Pacioli 's De divina proportione with an equilateral triangle on a human face. Camera lucida in use. Scientific American , Illustration of an artist using a camera obscura.

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Leonardo 's Vitruvian Man , c. Brunelleschi 's theory of perspective: Linear perspective in Piero della Francesca 's Flagellation of Christ , c. Parmigianino , Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror , c. Pythagoras with tablet of ratios, in Raphael 's The School of Athens , Entrance and yard of a yamen.



Painting by Torii Kiyonaga , Japan, c. The golden ratio roughly equal to 1. Other scholars argue that until Pacioli's work in , the golden ratio was unknown to artists and architects. Such Fibonacci ratios quickly become hard to distinguish from the golden ratio. Another ratio, the only other morphic number, [56] was named the plastic number [c] in by the Dutch architect Hans van der Laan originally named le nombre radiant in French.

Van der Laan used these ratios when designing the St. Benedictusberg Abbey church in the Netherlands. Benedictusberg Abbey church by Hans van der Laan has plastic number proportions. Planar symmetries have for millennia been exploited in artworks such as carpets , lattices, textiles and tilings. Many traditional rugs, whether pile carpets or flatweave kilims , are divided into a central field and a framing border; both can have symmetries, though in handwoven carpets these are often slightly broken by small details, variations of pattern and shifts in colour introduced by the weaver.

The general layout, too, is usually present, with arrangements such as stripes, stripes alternating with rows of motifs, and packed arrays of roughly hexagonal motifs. The field is commonly laid out as a wallpaper with a wallpaper group such as pmm, while the border may be laid out as a frieze of frieze group pm11, pmm2 or pma2. Turkish and Central Asian kilims often have three or more borders in different frieze groups.

Weavers certainly had the intention of symmetry, without explicit knowledge of its mathematics. These techniques include making opposites couple; opposing colour values; differentiating areas geometrically, whether by using complementary shapes or balancing the directionality of sharp angles; providing small-scale complexity from the knot level upwards and both small- and large-scale symmetry; repeating elements at a hierarchy of different scales with a ratio of about 2. Salingaros argues that "all successful carpets satisfy at least nine of the above ten rules", and suggests that it might be possible to create a metric from these rules.

Elaborate lattices are found in Indian Jali work, carved in marble to adorn tombs and palaces. Some have a central medallion, and some have a border in a frieze group. Dye; he identifies Sichuan as the centre of the craft. Symmetries are prominent in textile arts including quilting , [61] knitting , [65] cross-stitch , crochet , [66] embroidery [67] [68] and weaving , [69] where they may be purely decorative or may be marks of status. Islamic art exploits symmetries in many of its artforms, notably in girih tilings. These are formed using a set of five tile shapes, namely a regular decagon, an elongated hexagon, a bow tie, a rhombus, and a regular pentagon.

The tiles are decorated with strapwork lines girih , generally more visible than the tile boundaries. In , the physicists Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt argued that girih resembled quasicrystalline Penrose tilings. Hotamis kilim detail , central Anatolia , early 19th century. Detail of a Ming Dynasty brocade, using a chamfered hexagonal lattice pattern. Florentine Bargello pattern tapestry work. Ceiling of the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque , Isfahan , Rotational symmetry in lace: The complex geometry and tilings of the muqarnas vaulting in the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, Isfahan.

Architect's plan of a muqarnas quarter vault. Tupa Inca tunic from Peru , —, an Andean textile denoting high rank [70]. The Platonic solids and other polyhedra are a recurring theme in Western art. Traditional Indonesian wax-resist batik designs on cloth combine representational motifs such as floral and vegetal elements with abstract and somewhat chaotic elements, including imprecision in applying the wax resist, and random variation introduced by cracking of the wax.

Batik designs have a fractal dimension between 1 and 2, varying in different regional styles. For example, the batik of Cirebon has a fractal dimension of 1. The drip painting works of the modern artist Jackson Pollock are similarly distinctive in their fractal dimension. His Number 14 has a coastline-like dimension of 1. One of his last works, Blue Poles , took six months to create, and has the fractal dimension of 1.

The astronomer Galileo Galilei in his Il Saggiatore wrote that "[The universe] is written in the language of mathematics , and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures. Mathematicians, conversely, have sought to interpret and analyse art through the lens of geometry and rationality. The mathematician Felipe Cucker suggests that mathematics, and especially geometry, is a source of rules for "rule-driven artistic creation", though not the only one.

The mathematician Jerry P. King describes mathematics as an art, stating that "the keys to mathematics are beauty and elegance and not dullness and technicality", and that beauty is the motivating force for mathematical research. Hardy 's essay A Mathematician's Apology. In it, Hardy discusses why he finds two theorems of classical times as first rate, namely Euclid 's proof there are infinitely many prime numbers , and the proof that the square root of 2 is irrational.

King evaluates this last against Hardy's criteria for mathematical elegance: It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. Mathematics can be discerned in many of the arts, such as music , dance , [92] painting , architecture , and sculpture.

Each of these is richly associated with mathematics. Turner , [96] the Pre-Raphaelites and Wassily Kandinsky. Escher inspired by H. Coxeter and the architect Frank Gehry , who more tenuously argued that computer aided design enabled him to express himself in a wholly new way. The artist Richard Wright argues that mathematical objects that can be constructed can be seen either "as processes to simulate phenomena" or as works of " computer art ". He considers the nature of mathematical thought, observing that fractals were known to mathematicians for a century before they were recognised as such.

Wright concludes by stating that it is appropriate to subject mathematical objects to any methods used to "come to terms with cultural artifacts like art, the tension between objectivity and subjectivity, their metaphorical meanings and the character of representational systems.

An Introduction to Visual Mathematics takes a similar approach, looking at suitably visual mathematics topics such as tilings, fractals and hyperbolic geometry. Some of the first works of computer art were created by Desmond Paul Henry 's "Drawing Machine 1", an analogue machine based on a bombsight computer and exhibited in Mathematical sculpture by Bathsheba Grossman , The possible existence of a fourth dimension inspired artists to question classical Renaissance perspective: Maurice Princet joined us often He loved to get the artists interested in the new views on space that had been opened up by Schlegel and some others.

He succeeded at that. The impulse to make teaching or research models of mathematical forms naturally creates objects that have symmetries and surprising or pleasing shapes. He noted that this represented Enneper surfaces with constant negative curvature , derived from the pseudo-sphere.

This mathematical foundation was important to him, as it allowed him to deny that the object was "abstract", instead claiming that it was as real as the urinal that Duchamp made into a work of art. Man Ray admitted that the object's [Enneper surface] formula "meant nothing to me, but the forms themselves were as varied and authentic as any in nature. I was fascinated by the mathematical models I saw there It wasn't the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and to see one form within another which excited me.

The artists Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian founded the De Stijl movement, which they wanted to "establish a visual vocabulary comprised of elementary geometrical forms comprehensible by all and adaptable to any discipline". De Stijl artists worked in painting, furniture, interior design and architecture. The art critic Gladys Fabre observes that two progressions are at work in the painting, namely the growing black squares and the alternating backgrounds.

The mathematics of tessellation , polyhedra, shaping of space, and self-reference provided the graphic artist M. Escher — with a lifetime's worth of materials for his woodcuts. Escher used irregular polygons when tiling the plane and often used reflections, glide reflections , and translations to obtain further patterns. Many of his works contain impossible constructions, made using geometrical objects which set up a contradiction between perspective projection and three dimensions, but are pleasant to the human sight.

Escher's Ascending and Descending is based on the " impossible staircase " created by the medical scientist Lionel Penrose and his son the mathematician Roger Penrose. Some of Escher's many tessellation drawings were inspired by conversations with the mathematician H.

Coxeter on hyperbolic geometry. The Platonic solids —tetrahedrons, cubes, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, and icosahedrons—are especially prominent in Order and Chaos and Four Regular Solids. The visual intricacy of mathematical structures such as tessellations and polyhedra have inspired a variety of mathematical artworks. Stewart Coffin makes polyhedral puzzles in rare and beautiful woods; George W.

Hart works on the theory of polyhedra and sculpts objects inspired by them; Magnus Wenninger makes "especially beautiful" models of complex stellated polyhedra. The distorted perspectives of anamorphosis have been explored in art since the sixteenth century, when Hans Holbein the Younger incorporated a severely distorted skull in his painting The Ambassadors. Many artists since then, including Escher, have make use of anamorphic tricks. The mathematics of topology has inspired several artists in modern times.

The sculptor John Robinson — created works such as Gordian Knot and Bands of Friendship , displaying knot theory in polished bronze. Genesis is based on Borromean rings — a set of three circles, no two of which link but in which the whole structure cannot be taken apart without breaking.

Mathematical objects including the Lorenz manifold and the hyperbolic plane have been crafted using fiber arts including crochet. Miller used the Rule 90 cellular automaton to design tapestries depicting both trees and abstract patterns of triangles. Four-dimensional space to Cubism: Magnus Wenninger with some of his stellated polyhedra , The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger , , with severely distorted skull in foreground.

Modelling is far from the only possible way to illustrate mathematical concepts. Giotto's Stefaneschi Triptych , , illustrates recursion in the form of mise en abyme ; the central panel of the triptych contains, lower left, the kneeling figure of Cardinal Stefaneschi, holding up the triptych as an offering. In La condition humaine , Magritte depicts an easel on the real canvas , seamlessly supporting a view through a window which is framed by "real" curtains in the painting.

Similarly, Escher's Print Gallery is a print which depicts a distorted city which contains a gallery which recursively contains the picture, and so ad infinitum. He developed a style that he described as the geometry of life and the geometry of all nature. Consisting of simple geometric shapes with detailed patterning and coloring, in works such as Angular I and Automnes , Palazuelo expressed himself in geometric transformations. The artist Adrian Gray practises stone balancing , exploiting friction and the centre of gravity to create striking and seemingly impossible compositions.

Artists, however, do not necessarily take geometry literally. Escher; it depicts a seaside town containing an art gallery which seems to contain a painting of the seaside town, there being a "strange loop, or tangled hierarchy" to the levels of reality in the image. The artist himself, Hofstadter observes, is not seen; his reality and his relation to the lithograph are not paradoxical. Algorithmic analysis of images of artworks, for example using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy , can reveal information about art.

Such techniques can uncover images in layers of paint later covered over by an artist; help art historians to visualize an artwork before it cracked or faded; help to tell a copy from an original, or distinguish the brushstroke style of a master from those of his apprentices. Jackson Pollock 's drip painting style [] has a definite fractal dimension ; [] among the artists who may have influenced Pollock's controlled chaos , [] Max Ernst painted Lissajous figures directly by swinging a punctured bucket of paint over a canvas.

The computer scientist Neil Dodgson investigated whether Bridget Riley 's stripe paintings could be characterised mathematically, concluding that while separation distance could "provide some characterisation" and global entropy worked on some paintings, autocorrelation failed as Riley's patterns were irregular. Local entropy worked best, and correlated well with the description given by the art critic Robert Kudielka. The American mathematician George Birkhoff 's Aesthetic Measure proposes a quantitative metric of the aesthetic quality of an artwork.

It does not attempt to measure the connotations of a work, such as what a painting might mean, but is limited to the "elements of order" of a polygonal figure. Birkhoff first combines as a sum five such elements: The second metric, C , counts elements of the figure, which for a polygon is the number of different straight lines containing at least one of its sides. This can be interpreted as a balance between the pleasure looking at the object gives, and the amount of effort needed to take it in.

Birkhoff's proposal has been criticized in various ways, not least for trying to put beauty in a formula, but he never claimed to have done that. Art has sometimes stimulated the development of mathematics, as when Brunelleschi's theory of perspective in architecture and painting started a cycle of research that led to the work of Brook Taylor and Johann Heinrich Lambert on the mathematical foundations of perspective drawing, [] and ultimately to the mathematics of projective geometry of Girard Desargues and Jean-Victor Poncelet. Stimulus to projective geometry: Alberti 's diagram showing a circle seen in perspective as an ellipse.

Della Pittura , —6. Spring Into Action , by Jeff Beynon, made from a single paper rectangle. Optical illusions such as the Fraser spiral strikingly demonstrate limitations in human visual perception, creating what the art historian Ernst Gombrich called a "baffling trick. The mid-twentieth century Op art or optical art style of painting and graphics exploited such effects to create the impression of movement and flashing or vibrating patterns seen in the work of artists such as Bridget Riley , Spyros Horemis, [] and Victor Vasarely.

A strand of art from Ancient Greece onwards sees God as the geometer of the world, and the world's geometry therefore as sacred. The belief that God created the universe according to a geometric plan has ancient origins. Plutarch attributed the belief to Plato , writing that "Plato said God geometrizes continually" Convivialium disputationum , liber 8,2.

This image has influenced Western thought ever since. The Platonic concept derived in its turn from a Pythagorean notion of harmony in music, where the notes were spaced in perfect proportions, corresponding to the lengths of the lyre's strings; indeed, the Pythagoreans held that everything was arranged by Number.

In the same way, in Platonic thought, the regular or Platonic solids dictate the proportions found in nature, and in art. Codex Vindobonensis , c. Johannes Kepler 's Platonic solid model of planetary spacing in the solar system from Mysterium Cosmographicum , William Blake 's The Ancient of Days , From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. List of works designed with the golden ratio. Golden rectangles superimposed on the Mona Lisa. Planar symmetry , Wallpaper group , Islamic geometric patterns , and Kilim.

List of mathematical artists , fractal art , and computer art. Proto-Cubism , tessellation , M. Escher , Mathematics of paper folding , and Mathematics and fiber arts. Projective geometry and Mathematics of paper folding. Sacred geometry and Mathematics and music. William Blake's Newton , taking God's place as geometer, c. Retrieved 27 October Their Careers and Extant Works". Journal of Hellenic Studies. American Journal of Archaeology. Retrieved 25 June The base figure is a square the length and width of the distal phalange of the little finger. Its diagonals rotated to one side transform the square to a 1: In Figure 5 this rectangular figure marks the width and length of the adjacent medial phalange.

Rotating the medial diagonal proportions the proximal phalange and similarly from there to the wrist, from wrist to elbow and from elbow to shoulder top. Each new step advances the diagonal's pivot point. University of St Andrews. Retrieved 1 September The Visual Mind II.