CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL ARTS

LESSON 1 (PART 2):

HISTORY OF
VISUAL ARTS
Presented by: Joan Elizabeth G. Ibay
 Presentation
Outline
POINTS FOR DISCUSSION

Art vs, Craft

History of Visual Arts
Early Art
Renaissance
The Baroque Era

GEE3 - Reading Visual Arts

 Art vs. Craft

GEE3 - Reading Visual Arts

 Based on the video, what
was the reason why art and
craft were distinguished
from one another?
Do you agree that art and
craft should be isolated
from one another? Why or
why not?
For you, is art and craft the
same?
 History of
VISUAL ARTS

Early Art Renaissance The Baroque Era

3000 BCE - 1300 CE 1300 - 1700 1600 - 1700

GEE3 - Reading Visual Arts

 History of
VISUAL ARTS

Rocco to Romantic and Modernism Contemporary Art

Neoclassicism Academic Art 1900 - 1970 1970 - PRESENT
1700-1800 1800 - 1900

GEE3 - Reading Visual Arts

 HISTORY OF VISUAL ARTS

EARLY ART
C. 3000 BCE - 1300 CE

Stone-Age Sculpture Ancient Greece

Cave Paintings Ancient Rome
Cities and Civilizations Byzantine Art
 STONE-AGE SCULPTURE
The oldest known works of art.
These were discovered perhaps 32,000 years ago
found across Europe and Asia.

Mystical, probably religious purpose.

They make clear the long-lasting human need to
understand—perhaps to satisfy—an uncertain and
frequently hostile world using carefully created
objects.

GEE3 - Reading Visual Arts

 Venus of Willendorf
It was found in Austria and
dates from between 32,000
and 27,000 years ago.
The Venus of Willendorf, as this
oddly misshapen figure is
known, was almost certainly a
fertility offering.
The carving’s swelling limbs
and breasts invest it with a
strong sexual quality.

GEE3 - Reading Visual Arts

CAVE PAINTING
Animal Paintings
It started between about 25,000 and
12,000 years ago.
These paintings acutely observed and
brilliantly depicted animals—mammoths,
bison, hyenas, and horses.
A variety of materials, chiefly red ocher
and charcoal, were used. These were
applied by sticks, feathers, or moss,
sometimes by hand.
Their purpose is suspected to be religious—
part fearful, part celebratory.

GEE3 - Reading Visual Arts

 Do you agree that these early
artworks were made for religious
purposes? Why or why not?
CITIES AND CIVILIZATIONS
Agriculture paved the way.
As settled agriculture began, strengthened by the
domestication of goats and sheep, so surplus food
production permitted the development of divisions of
labor and the emergence of ruling classes, often priestly

People were motivated to please their gods.

A series of rulers commissioned images that would
underline their status and their right to rule.
CITIES AND CIVILIZATIONS

Pottery and Marble Figures Bronze Head of a Ruler Palette of Narmer

Sumer Akkadian Egypt
Their art usually served a This art is not just a technical Ancient Egyptian art reflected the
religious purpose. triumph but also a defining rigidly hierarchical society from
The others were used as a image of a hierarchical ruler: which it developed.
means of survival. remote and magnificent. It also echoed their obsession with
death and the afterlife.
It has a near-unique continuity.
Egyptian art was almost entirely
GEE3 - Reading Visual Arts symbolic.
 Draw a connection between
agriculture and the development
of different artworks in various
cities and civilizations.
What are the central themes of the
artworks of these cities and
civilizations?
ANCIENT GREEK ART
Athens saw a burst of artistic creation.
In the 5th Century BCE, Athens saw an
astonishingly fertile burst of artistic
creation.

Nothing much left from the Greek art.

Only a handful of fragments of Greek
paintings have survived; many Greek
sculptures are known only from
Roman copies or written descriptions,
and what architecture still exists is
extensively ruined.

Audora Art Gallery | 2020

 ANCIENT GREEK ART
High Aesthetic Idelism
Greek art embodies technical sophistication and
the ideal form of the human body.
It gives way to a sense of movement and drama

Not a Natural and Direct Reality Representation

Greek art represents the idyllic and perfect vision of
the artistic mind.
Their religion played an important part in their art.
They view humans as separate and the most
important entities.
Comparable Levels of Technical Achievement
Greek art reveals the confidence and technical
mastery of their creators.
Boy from Antikythera, c. 340 BCE, height 76 in (194 cm),

bronze, Athens: National Archeological Museum

Audora Art Gallery | 2020

ANCIENT ROMAN ART
Uniquely among the leading powers of
the ancient world, Rome developed only
a limited artistic language of its own.
Roman art was largely imitative and
utilitarian.
Roman art became inferior in the face
of Greek artistic achievement.
Most of the surviving examples of
Roman painting are from Pompeii.
These offer crucial clues to the earlier
Greek painting on which they were
modeled.

Audora Art Gallery | 2020

BYZANTINE ART
Heavy Influence of Christianity
The most important subject of
Byzantine art was Christianity.
Gestures and even colors came to
acquire precise and invariable
meanings.
It was in Byzantium, that the Virgin
Mary was developed as one of the
key icons of Christian art.

Audora Art Gallery | 2020

How is Byzantine art different from
the Greek and Roman arts?
HISTORY OF VISUAL ARTS

RENAISSANCE
C. 1300 - 1700
EARLY RENAISSANCE
Italy gave birth to Renaissance
It was in Italy that the Renaissance achieved its fullest
flowering.
It was here that the physical remains of the ancient world—
notably sculpture and architecture —were most numerous and
so most easily studied.

European thought was becoming more

questioning and freethinking
People began to look for rational explanations of the physical
environment and human behavior, and were ready to reject the
dogmatic propositions and blind faith that controlled the
elaborately complex medieval world.
 Three major Principle 1:
principles A renewed, more systematic
study of Classical Antiquity in
underlined the the belief that it constituted
an absolute standard of
Renaissance artistic worth

Principle 2:
Faith in the nobility of man
(Humanism).

Principle 3:
The discovery and mastery of
linear perspective. Together,
they made up a revolution in
Western art.
 STYLES
Represented a decisive break
with the immediate past.
The change came first—and
most obviously—in sculpture.
SUBJECTS
Though religious subjects
continued to predominate,
there was an increasing
interest in secular subjects.
 During the Renaissance,
being an artist could be
a lucrative career. Most
artists worked solely for
commission and survived
through the patronage
of the aristocratic courts.

Audora Art Gallery | 2020

HISTORY OF VISUAL ARTS

THE BAROQUE ERA

C. 1600 - 1700
THE BAROQUE ERA
Baroque is used to describe an era that saw the creation of
some of the most grandiose and spectacular buildings,
paintings, and sculptures in the history of art.
The reasons for this extravagance lay in societies pulled
apart by deep ideological and religious divisions.
It is used by the Catholic Church to proclaim its
continuing power—hence the best examples are to be
found in Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Southern Germany,
and Central Europe.
It is also loved by Absolute Monarchs who wanted to
emphasize their worldly authority and the riches of their
possessions and lifestyle.
 STYLES SUBJECT
“The style of absolutism” Religious subjects were
was used by the Catholic paramount, especially the lives
Church as a means of of saints and martyrs.
harnessing the Mythological characters, such
magnificence of art to as the chaste nymph Daphne
influence the largest or Proserpine, raped by Pluto,
possible audience. were used to illustrate
Its hallmarks are an religious ideals of purity.
illusion, movement, drama, Portraits tended to be
rich color, and pomposity. bombastic and self-
consciously dramatic.
The Rape of the
Sabines c. 1637–
38, 62 1 ⁄2 x 81 in
(159 cm x 206
cm), oil on
canvas, Paris:
Musée du Louvre.

Samson and
Delilah c. 1609

Fontana del Moro Gianlorenzo

Bernini, 1653, stone, Rome:
Piazza Navona
QUESTION?
References
Cumming, R. (2005). Eyewitness Companions: Art. United States of America: DK Publishing, Inc.
DeWitte, D., Larmann, R., & Shields, M. (2018). Gateways to Art: Understanding the Visual Arts. United
States of America: Thames & Hudson
The changing world of visual arts. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.toppr.com/guides/history/the-
changing-world-of-visual-arts/the-history-of-visualarts/
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Art history: visual arts. Retrieved from
https://www.britannica.com/art/art-history
Visual art. (n.d.). PBS Learning Media. Retrieved from https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/subjects/the-
arts/visual-art/society-and-history-of-visualart/