The ancients recognized seven activities as arts

History
Poetry
Comedy
Tragedy
Music
Dance
Astronomy

Religious activity

Performing arts celebrated the rituals, History recorded the story of the race, astronomy
searched the heavens. In each of these seven classical arts we can discover the roots of
contemporary cultural and scientific categories.

By 13th century the word ‘art had taken a considerably more practical connotation. The liberal
arts curriculum of the medieval university still numbered seven components? 7?

The literary arts of the classical period – History, Poetry, Comedy and tragedy- merged into a
vaguely defined mix of literature and philosophy as Grammar, Rhetoric & Logic (Trivium)
Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy.

By the late seventeenth century It was increasingly applied to activities that had never before
been included—painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture—what we now call the "Fine Arts."
The rise of the concept of modern science as separate from and contradictory to the arts meant
that Astronomy and Geometry were no longer regarded in the same light as Poetry or Music.

By the late eighteenth century, the Romantic vision of the artist as specially endowed restored
some of the religious aura that had surrounded the word in classical times. A differentiation
was now made between "artist" and "artisan." The former was "creative" or "imaginative," the
latter simply a skilled workman.

In the nineteenth century, as the concept of science developed, the narrowing of the concept
of art continued, as if in response to that more rigorously logical activity. What had once been
"natural philosophy" was termed "natural science"; the art of alchemy became the science of
chemistry. The new sciences were precisely defined intellectual activities, dependent on
rigorous methods of operation. The arts (which were increasingly seen as being that which
science was not) were therefore also more clearly defined.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the word had more or less developed the constellation
of connotations we know today. It referred first to the visual, or "Fine," arts, then more
generally to literature and the musical arts. It could, on occasion, be stretched to include the
performing arts and, although in its broadest sense it still carried the medieval sense of skills,
for the most part it was strictly used to refer to more sophisticated endeavors. The romantic
sense of the artist as a chosen one remained: "artists" were distinguished not only from
"artisans" (craftspeople) but also from "artistes" (performing artists) with lower social and
intellectual standing.