Paleolithic Painting

The earliest paintings and drawings that we know of are Paleolithic drawings on the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France. They are line drawings with some shading and color, which provide a very realistic view of the animals the artist saw outside the caves 32,000 years ago. The drawings were nicely 3-dimensional.

Take another jump forward, yet another sixteen thousand years to about 650 AD in Estern Asia.

There was no tradition of hanging paintings on walls in China. Instead people kept silk scrolls that were unrolled and shown to guests when needed but otherwise rolled and stored.

These silk scrolls were decorated with ink. There wasn't much opportunity for swaths of color in something which had to be rolled for storage. Indeed outline painting continued in China to this very day and colored paintings had to wait for the silk to be embroidered.

Mary or Christ had to be larger than and above other figures. Figures were painted full face forward and creativity found no acceptance in the church market for art.

Artisans merely copied religious relics according to fairly strict rules of acceptance by the church:

That only changed when Giotto, Cimabue's pupil, started the Renaissance in painting in the late 13th century. He gave figures real postures and expressions and included an attempt at perspective in his paintings.

The Italian Renaissance Painters 1300 - 1500

Since the church was the major market for art, religious themes were paramount for the aspiring artist but, even so, a number of painters made great strides: real faces with emotions, real lighting, three dimensions and perspective, new patronage, and a change from temera egg-based paints to oils with vivid colors.

Art became as exciting and as real as again as the wall paintings in the Roman villas a thousand years ago. The Renaissance, was centered principally in Northern Italy in the towns of Florence, Milan, Rome and Venice. These were the artists who lead the Renaissance.

These painters did not spring out as talented individuals. Each ran workshops and their pupils became the teachers of another generation. Below we see the sequence of passing the tourch..

Cimabue (1240 - 1302) taught Giotto (1267 - 1337)

Fra Angelico (1395 - 1456) taught Gozzoli (1421 - 1497)

Van Eyck (1395 - 1441) in Antwerp taught Bellini (1431 - 1516)

Masaccio (1401 - 1428) influenced Raphael (1489 - 1520)

Bellini (1431 - 1516) taught Giorgione (1477 - 1510) and Titian (1485 - 1576)

Verrochio 1435 - 1488) taught Leonardo (1452 - 1519) and Botticelli (1444 - 1510)

Ghirlanaio (1448 - 1494) taught Michelangelo (1415 - 1564)

Then came Caravaggio who saw and painted real people and real emotions

The Flemish Renaissance Painters 1400 - 1550

With the discovery of sea routes from India, Venice lost the trade from the east, so it was through Antwerp and Bruges that painters like Van Eyck first had access to oils. Even as the Sotuhern Netherlandich and Flemish painters came into their own there was considerable travel between the two centres by which ideas were exchanged. The northern group used pigments dissolved in oils for slow drying paint instead of the very fast drying tempera where the pigments were dissolved in egg white. Bellini came north to learn the technqiues and immediately transformed his Venetian workshop to use oil.

On the other hand, Northern painters went south to learn new techniques involving lighting and perspective. Dürer is credited with introducing most ideas to the north but many other artists like Bruegel and Ruebens also journeyed south.

Arnolfini

The new techniques, while still applied to religious subjects in Italy, found their use in non-religous subjects in the Low Countries where even before the Reformation there was an acceptance for other subjects. Fortunately it was a prosperous era when even private persons could afford to commission art.

This appeal to everyday life, activity, and people, allowed the Flemish and Dutch painters to eclipse the classic subjects of Northern Italy.

The Seventeenth Century

By now, the restrictive influence of the church was largely past … there was no limit to what artists could produce and clients were willing to be persuaded what to buy. Oils on canvases were de rigor and the new techniques of perspective, realism, chiaroscura lighting were all invoked. Here are a few of the artists painting then. THey were in an age of enlightenment and fun.

Classicism, Symbolism.

Impressionism .Pointillism.

Art Nouveau. Fauvism. Dada, Cubism. Surrealism. Bauhaus, Futurism, Expressionism, Op Art

Pop Arr. Abstract Expressionism, Der Blaue Reiter, Minimalism.

Action Art, Contemporary, Graffiti

Most of these are meaningless except to specialized doctoral students cince they were praticed by small groups of artists attemtping something new.. Some are really false conceptions and Graffiti would be better named Vandalism..

The principle movement that made a difference in overall art is Impressionism and that encompassed almost a century with painters who are now labeled pre-impressionists and others who are post-impressionists. The word stands for itself: rather than painting detailed pictures, impressionists wanted only to paint an impression of what they saw, whose deails would be later completed by the viewer. Expressionism is when a painter distorts reality in order to convey emotion.

Here is the work of a few major impressionists and expressionists:

Impressionists - an impression of what they saw

Expressionists - reality distorted for emotion Although El Greco painted three hundred years before the name was formed and would have been classed as in the Mannerism class, he really forecast expressionism.

The Future

now depends on the Internet and a world-wide market for paintings. No longer is an artist restricted to selling in one market as it was when the church was the only sponsor nor is the artist restricted in the location in which he or she paints. Anything goes including digital art.

One more example of one form of today's 'art' (grafitti vandalism) may be appropriate since it brings us back to the beginning of this essay.

References:

"Medici Money," Tim Parks, Atlas Books, 2005

"Caravaggio - Painter of Miracles," Francine Prose. Harper Collins, 2005

"A Brief History of Painting … 2000 BC to 2000 AD," Roy Bolton, Carroll and Graff Publishers, 2004

"What do Great Paintings Say?" Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, Volumes 1 and 2, Taschen Books, 2003

"Olga's Gallery," <http://www.abcgallery.com/> 2006