Map of Art
The cities where movements were born, the places the masters painted — from Florence to Paris, from Arles to Edo. Tap a marker for the story, tap the legend to filter by art world.
☜ Tap a marker and its story appears here.
The Old Masters of Europe
Capitals of Modern Art
The Painters of the East
This universe carries no images of the works (the copyright of artworks must be checked piece by piece); it shows only the lineage and relations of movements and masters. The coastline data is shared with "History of Technology" (Natural Earth, longitude -130° to 145°, latitude 10° to 72°), covering Europe, China, Japan, and Mexico; place coordinates use standard identifications of the masters’ main places of activity.
Places on this map
Florence
The cradle of the Renaissance. Under the patronage of the Medici, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Botticelli came of age here and painted "the human" back to the center of the picture. One city all but bore the whole golden generation of the Renaissance.
Connected figures: Leonardo da Vinci · Michelangelo · Botticelli
Rome
The stage of the High Renaissance and the Baroque. Here Michelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling neck-craned, Raphael painted The School of Athens, and Caravaggio, with astonishing light and shade, painted piercing religious scenes for the churches.
Connected figures: Michelangelo · Raphael · Caravaggio
Amsterdam
The heart of the Dutch Golden Age. Here Rembrandt painted The Night Watch and nearly a hundred self-portraits, letting light rise from darkness to illuminate the finest emotion on a face — and to see his own life from prime to ruin.
Connected figures: Rembrandt
Delft
The Dutch town where Vermeer lived all his life. Here he painted the quiet corners of ordinary homes, gilding the everyday with uncanny light — Girl with a Pearl Earring was born here.
Connected figures: Vermeer
Madrid
The seat of the Spanish court, where Velázquez served as chief court painter and painted Las Meninas, a riddle debated for more than three centuries. Three hundred years on, Picasso paid it homage in dozens of variations.
Connected figures: Velázquez
Paris
The art capital of the nineteenth-century world. Here the Impressionists first exhibited, were mocked and then embraced; Monet, Renoir, and Degas carried their easels outdoors, Cézanne and Seurat pushed open the door to modern art, and Picasso and Matisse later raised their revolution.
Connected figures: Monet · Renoir · Degas · Cézanne · Seurat · Picasso · Matisse · Duchamp
Arles
Where Van Gogh went south in search of sun and color. Here he painted the Sunflowers and blazing wheatfields, and here too he split fiercely with Gauguin and cut off his own ear. The fierce sun of the south made his most ardent, and most painful, work.
Giverny
Monet’s garden and home in his later years. Here he dug a pond, planted water lilies, and painted that water and light over and over, until the picture all but dissolved into pure color — the great Water Lilies series, the swan song of Impressionism at the edge of abstraction.
Connected figures: Monet
Barcelona
The city where Picasso grew up and began his art. He spent his youth in this Catalan city, where his early "Blue Period" took shape, before going north to Paris to raise the storm of Cubism.
New York
The new art capital of the world in the latter twentieth century. Here in his "Factory," Andy Warhol used silkscreen to reproduce soup cans and celebrity faces into Pop Art, erasing the line between high art and commercial imagery.
Connected figures: Andy Warhol
Mexico City
The home of Frida Kahlo. Here in her "Blue House," she painted the pain of her accident, the torment of her marriage, and her love of Mexico into her self-portraits, becoming a symbol of women’s strength and identity.
Connected figures: Frida Kahlo
Edo (Tokyo)
The center of ukiyo-e. Here Hokusai made his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, whose Great Wave off Kanagawa became the best-known Japanese picture in the world. These prints flowed into Europe through trade and directly kindled the "Japonisme" fever of Impressionism.
Connected figures: Katsushika Hokusai
Kaifeng (Bianjing)
The Northern Song capital of Bianjing, the city painted in Along the River During the Qingming Festival. In one five-meter handscroll, Zhang Zeduan gathered the whole street life of the city at Qingming — bridges, grain boats, taverns, over eight hundred figures — the summit of Chinese genre painting.
Connected figures: Zhang Zeduan
Jiankang (Nanjing)
The Eastern Jin capital, where Gu Kaizhi, founder of Chinese figure painting, was active. He held that "the spirit is captured in the eyes," and in lines flowing like a silkworm spinning silk painted the Nymph of the Luo River, setting the thousand-year tradition of "likeness of spirit over likeness of form."
Connected figures: Gu Kaizhi
Beijing
Where the modern ink master Qi Baishi long settled and painted. Here he painted the most ordinary shrimp, crab, and cabbage into pure delight, holding that the wonder lies "between likeness and unlikeness," and gave Chinese freehand painting new life in the twentieth century.
Connected figures: Qi Baishi