HPW Art History

27 periods and movements

A concise timeline of art history

From the first cave paintings to the art being made today. Choose any period for its key ideas, the people behind it and the works to know.

The ancient world

Before 500 CE

  1. Prehistoric art

    c. 40,000–3000 BCE

    The earliest images and objects people made, from cave paintings to carved figures and standing stones.

  2. Ancient Egypt

    c. 3100–30 BCE

    Three thousand years of remarkably consistent art made for temples, tombs and the afterlife.

  3. Ancient Greece

    c. 900–31 BCE

    The search for ideal proportion and lifelike movement that became a foundation of the Western tradition.

  4. Ancient Rome

    c. 509 BCE–476 CE

    Art in the service of the state: realistic portraits, engineering on a vast scale and images that carried Rome’s message across an empire.

The medieval world

c. 300–1400

  1. Classic Maya

    c. 250–900

    City-states whose carvings, murals and painted ceramics recorded kings, gods and history in image and script.

  2. Byzantine art

    c. 330–1453

    The art of the Eastern Roman Empire, where gold mosaics and icons made the sacred visible.

  3. Art of the Islamic world

    c. 650–1800

    A shared visual language of calligraphy, geometry and ornament carried across three continents.

  4. Song dynasty painting

    960–1279

    Monumental landscapes in ink that made mountains and water the most admired subject in Chinese painting.

  5. Romanesque

    c. 1000–1150

    Massive stone churches with round arches and vivid carved portals, built along Europe’s pilgrimage roads.

  6. Gothic

    c. 1140–1500

    Cathedrals that dissolved their walls into stained glass, and a new naturalism in sculpture and painting.

The early modern world

c. 1400–1800

  1. Benin court art

    c. 1300–1897

    Brass and ivory sculpture made by royal guilds to record the history and authority of the kings of Benin.

  2. Renaissance

    c. 1400–1600

    A revival of classical learning that put human experience, observation and perspective at the center of art.

  3. Baroque

    c. 1600–1750

    Drama, movement and strong contrasts of light, designed to involve the viewer directly.

  4. Ukiyo-e

    c. 1670–1868

    Woodblock prints of the “floating world” that brought actors, beauties and landscapes to a mass audience in Edo Japan.

  5. Rococo

    c. 1715–1780

    A light, playful and ornamental style made for aristocratic interiors.

The long nineteenth century

c. 1760–1900

  1. Neoclassicism

    c. 1760–1840

    A return to the clarity and moral seriousness of ancient Greece and Rome.

  2. Romanticism

    c. 1790–1850

    Emotion, imagination and the overwhelming power of nature, set against the order of the Enlightenment.

  3. Realism

    c. 1840–1880

    Ordinary people and everyday work, painted without idealization.

  4. Impressionism

    c. 1865–1890

    Painting the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, outdoors and on the spot.

  5. Post-Impressionism

    c. 1886–1905

    Artists who took Impressionist color in more structured, symbolic and personal directions.

Modern and contemporary

1900 to today

  1. Expressionism

    c. 1905–1925

    Color and form distorted to express inner feeling rather than outward appearance.

  2. Cubism

    c. 1907–1920

    Objects broken apart and reassembled from several viewpoints at once.

  3. Dada and Surrealism

    1916–c. 1950

    Chance, absurdity and the unconscious mind, used to overturn accepted ideas of what art is.

  4. Abstract Expressionism

    c. 1943–1960

    Large-scale abstract painting that treated the canvas as an arena for gesture and feeling.

  5. Pop Art

    c. 1955–1970

    Images taken from advertising, comics and consumer goods, presented as fine art.

  6. Minimalism and Conceptual art

    c. 1960–1975

    Art reduced to simple forms and industrial materials, and then to the idea itself.

  7. Contemporary art

    c. 1970–today

    A global, plural field with no single dominant style, working across every medium.

The time axis is not to scale. Earlier periods are compressed so that short, recent movements stay visible; every entry lists its own dates.