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Beginner’s Guide

This is a beginner’s map of art history, from the Renaissance to modern art, joined to the painters of the East. Sixty-two masters thread the main line: painting the human back to the center → the duel of the classical and the Romantic → carrying the easel outdoors → toward the inner and the structural → asking anew what even counts as art. The goal is not to memorize who painted which picture, but to see clearly how, over these five hundred years, painting moved step by step from "looking real" to "painting feeling" to "questioning art itself."

Know These Few Things First

  • The great arc of Western painting can be roughly put as a path of "less and less like": the Renaissance sought lifelikeness, Impressionism began painting light and feeling, and modern art simply threw out "looking real" to ask "what even counts as art." Grasp this line and the whole of art history has a spine.
  • This site carries no images — not an oversight, but because the copyright of artworks is far more tangled than text and must be checked piece by piece. What we build here is a "map of relations and lineage": who influenced whom, who contended with whom, which step pushed open the next. Once you see the lineage, going to a museum or searching for the originals feels very different.
  • "Influence" is the core relation of art history. The "mentor/disciple" links in the graph mostly mean influence of style and idea (Cézanne → Picasso, Hokusai → Van Gogh), not literal apprenticeship; a "nemesis" (Picasso and Matisse) is often a great rival who is at once foe and friend.
  • East and West work with two pairs of eyes: the West prizes perspective, volume, and light; the East prizes line, spirit, and empty space. Yet the two were not strangers — in the nineteenth century, Japanese ukiyo-e flowed into Europe through trade and in turn kindled Impressionism, a hidden thread you only find by "connecting things up."

A Few Suggestions

  1. Look at the timeline first and grasp five turning points: the Renaissance (painting the human back to the center), the Baroque (the drama of light and shade), Impressionism (painting light), Post-Impressionism (toward the inner), and modern art (questioning art itself). Each step is a revolt against, or a push beyond, the last.
  2. Note the cross-universe "meanwhile": Guernica (1937) and the approach of the Second World War in the European History universe, or the rise of Impressionism and the industrializing Paris of the nineteenth century, line up sideways in the "World Lens" — art never happens in a vacuum.
  3. The cross-block links in the graph are the most worth opening: Cézanne → Picasso (Post-Impressionism into the modern), Hokusai → Van Gogh and Monet (the East kindling the West), Velázquez → Picasso (a three-hundred-year homage across time). The wonder of art history is all in these undercurrents of "influence."

How to Read

To understand "why modern art is hard to get"

Walk the "less and less like" line: the Renaissance painted lifelike, Impressionism began painting light and the feeling of the instant, Cézanne asked after the geometry of objects, Picasso simply broke it apart and reassembled it, and Duchamp sent a urinal to an exhibition — and you find that modern art is not "unable to paint," but that the question it wanted to ask had long shifted from "does it look real" to "what even counts as art."

To see "how East and West influenced each other"

Follow the Hokusai thread. His ukiyo-e prints flowed into Europe with Japanese goods, and their bold compositions and flat blocks of color were a treasure to Monet and Van Gogh, kindling directly the "Japonisme" of Impressionism. One great wave from Japan thus swept the Western art world — a rare head-on meeting of the two pairs of eyes, East and West.

To find the doors into the other subjects

Look at Raphael’s School of Athens (connecting to the philosophers of the "Philosophy" universe), Picasso’s Guernica (connecting to the wars of "European History"), and Leonardo (also in "European History" and "History of Technology"). Art is yet another mirror onto history, philosophy, and technology — the same Leonardo is a painter here, an engineer elsewhere.

Go Deeper: Introductory Reading

E. H. Gombrich, The Story of ArtWidely held the finest introduction to Western art history, telling the whole story from prehistory to the modern as one coherent, readable narrative.
Janson’s History of ArtA more systematic, encyclopedic classic textbook, for readers who want a full grasp of every period and movement.
Museum audio guides and official collection sitesSince this site carries no images, pair it with a museum guide or a search for the originals — seeing the pictures alongside the lineage is the best way to read.

A Thread of Coordinates

Renaissance & Baroque (15th–17th c.)
  • Botticelli, The Birth of Venus
  • 1512: Michelangelo completes the Sistine ceiling
  • 1642: Rembrandt, The Night Watch
  • 1656: Velázquez, Las Meninas
Impressionism & Post-Impressionism (19th c.)
  • 1874: the first Impressionist exhibition
  • 1886: Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
  • 1889: Van Gogh, The Starry Night
  • c. 1831: Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Modern Art (20th c.)
  • 1907: Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — Cubism is born
  • 1917: Duchamp, Fountain
  • 1937: Picasso, Guernica
  • 1962: Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans
The Painters of the East (4th–20th c.)
  • Eastern Jin: Gu Kaizhi, Nymph of the Luo River
  • Northern Song: Zhang Zeduan, Along the River During the Qingming Festival
  • Edo: Hokusai, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
  • Modern: Qi Baishi’s freehand birds and flowers