♦ Artists employed resources from their natural environments

♦ Artifacts from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

♦ Subject matter included animals and people and often told stories.

♦ Animals were represented in great detail, while human figures were of less significance.

♦ Much of the remaining art comes from tombs and monuments.

♦ Sculpture and architecture from Greek civilization have influenced others throughout history.

♦ Architectural monuments, sculptural masterpieces, consummate craft.

♦ A variety of medium including illuminated manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, stained glass, metal works, mosaics and even textiles.

♦ Common forms of artistic expression: paintings, mosaics, and sculpture.

♦ Exponents: Greeks (Byzantine Mosaics, Orthodox Icons), Andryi Rubliov

♦ Lavishly decorated architecture, manuscripts and embroidery.

♦ Exponents: Facundus, Hildegard of Bingen, Herrad of Landsberg, Nicholas of Verdun, Claricia

♦ Features: very ornately designed cathedrals with luminous stained glass windows, pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, and ornate decoration

♦ Exponents: Pietro Lorenzetti, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Gentile da Fabriano, Limbourg brothers, Pisanello

♦ Features: “avant-garde”, or experimental and innovative period; depicting an emotional experience rather than reality based imagery; vivid colors and bold strokes were often used to exaggerate these emotions and feelings.

♦ Exponents: Lovis Corinth, Edvard Munch, Wassily Kandinsky, Otto Mueller, Mstyslav Dobuzhynskiy, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and others.

♦ Features: the wild beasts; a radical use of unnatural colors that separated color from its usual representational and realistic role; giving new, emotional meaning to the colors; creating a strong, unified work that appears flat on the canvas.

♦ Exponents: Henri Matisse (“Woman with a Hat”, “Open Window”), Georges Rouault (“Game of Carnage”), Maurice de Vlaminck (“The River Seine at Chatou”), André Derain (“Charing Cross Bridge”) and others.

♦ Features: broken, reassembled and abstracted forms; flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane; rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective; foreshortening; modeling; chiaroscuro; refuting time-honoured theories that art should imitate nature.

♦ Exponents: Pablo Picasso (“The Girls of Avignon”), Georges Braque, Andre Lhote, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and others.

♦ Features: the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life.

♦ Exponents: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Antonio Sant'Elia, Bruno Munari, Benedetta Cappa, Luigi Russolo, Natalia Goncharova, David Burliuk and others.

♦ Features: a response to the seriousness of war; rejecting traditional standards of art; art and humor in the meaningless objects of everyday life; artistic freedom; irrationalism; spontaneity.

♦ Exponents: Max Ernst, George Grosz, Hans Bellmer, Alice Bailly, Arthur Segal, Francis Picabia, Man Ray and others.

♦ Features: dream-like scenes and symbolic images; unexpected, illogical juxtapositions; bizarre assemblages of ordinary objects; automatism and a spirit of spontaneity; games and techniques to create random effects; personal iconography; distorted figures and biomorphic shapes.

♦ Exponents: Salvador Dali, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Nash, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Andre Masson, Paul Delvaux, M.C. Escher, Rene Magritte

♦ Features: influences of popular culture such as advertising, comic books and cultural objects; the using of mass-produced imagery in a fine arts context.

♦ Exponents: Walter Battiss, Howard Finster, May Wilson, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, and others.

♦ Features: a reaction against the Abstract Expressionists; the repetition of simple geometric forms, like lines or squares; early works tended to be monochromatic, or a limited palette of one or a few closely related colors; many minimalist works are hard-edged, with clear, precise transitions between areas of color.

♦ Exponents: Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, Frank Stella, and others.

♦ Features: complex and paradoxical optical spaces through the illusory manipulation of such simple repetitive forms as parallel lines, checkerboard patterns, and concentric circles or by creating chromatic tension from the juxtaposition of complementary (chromatically opposite) colours of equal intensity; an impression of movement, vibration, swelling, warping and hidden imagery.

♦ Exponents: Victor Vasarely (“Epoff”), Bridget Riley, Adolf Fleischmann, M.C. Escher (“Relativity”), Mario Ballocco, and others.

One of my favourite eras in art is the Renaissance (13th-16th centuries). It is one of the most brilliant periods in the history of European cultural development. The Renaissance, using the lessons of antiquity, introduced innovations. He was not bringing back to life all the ancient genres, but only those that were in line with the aspirations of its time and culture. The exponents of the era, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Botticelli and and Titian are the great assets of the whole history of art. Speaking of the main aspects and themes of Renaissance art, human is being no longer simply described or portrayed - he is evaluated on the basis of the ideals of his time. His feelings become significant. Therefore, a lot of place in art is taken by the feeling of love, which most clearly demonstrates the uniqueness and significance of the person. The Renaissance is also concerned with religion and capturing the essence and beauty of nature. The emergence of the Renaissance is a turning point in the history of art, as it is a transition from the Middle Ages to a new age and new realities. That’s why for me, it is one of the most significant cultural eras. ❤