Movements and Periods in the Western Tradition

Art history is often organized into movements and periods: groupings of artists who shared aims, styles, or concerns at a given time. These labels are simplifications made mostly by later historians, and many artists resist tidy categories, but the framework is useful for seeing how ideas about art have changed. This lesson surveys some major moments in the Western tradition as a map for further study, not a complete history.

From the Renaissance to the Baroque

The Renaissance (roughly the 15th and 16th centuries) revived interest in classical antiquity and pursued naturalism through the study of anatomy, proportion, and linear perspective, a geometric system for representing depth on a flat surface. Art became more closely tied to observation and to humanist ideas about the dignity of the