A (yet to be completed) History of Western Art
I’ve condensed my notes on Western art and posted them in pdf files below. Each file is about half the size of the original (the earliest of which dates back to 2008). Some notable art has been cut but important paintings and trends remain.
Most files have a table of contents which can be used for navigation (Ctrl+Click on an item in the contents table will take you directly to the page). Scrolling through the files and stopping when a picture catches the attention works well too. There are lots of pictures. In the original Word files these are of high resolution but a great deal of fidelity is lost in the translation to pdf format. Nevertheless, zooming in should reveal details.
Here is a list of artists covered in each section.
Greek and Roman (18 pages, 30 pictures) –> Greek_Roman. Important foundations of form and theory come from these ages. Greek artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius of ancient Greece and Alexander the Great’s court artist Apelles are mentioned. Architecture is omitted. The Pantheon, and temples of Vesta at Tivoli and Castel Sant’Angelo can be seen in their original pristine state in landscapes by Claude and Poussin in the 17th century.
Early Christian & Byzantine (23 pages, 39 pictures) –>Early Christian_and_Byzantine The emergence of art for Christians, originally a persecuted sect, the differences between Western and Byzantine images, and the illuminations of the Celts. The churches of S Apollinare and S Vitale at Ravenna are included, the latter the first example of Byzantine architecture in Western Europe, of which the most notable example is the perfect, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (Istanbul).
Late Mediaeval (24 pages, 33 pictures) –> Late_Medieval The artists included are Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, Simone Martini, The Limbourg Brothers, Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello.
Fifteenth Century (67 pages, 83 pictures) –> Fifteenth_Century. From now on there is more detail. Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca, Sandro Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Antonello da Messina, Albrecht Durer.
Sixteenth Century has two files.
Italy (89 pages, 110 pictures) –> Sixteenth_Century_Italy has longer sections of text because art developed in many directions. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto.
Northern Europe and Spain (69 pages, 94 pictures) –> Sixteenth_Century_NEurope_Spain.docx. Included are pictures of closed doors of triptychs (especially those by Bosch), which are not usually seen in museums. Hieronymus Bosch, Joachim Patinir, Matthias Grunewald, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Pieter Bruegel and El Greco.
Seventeenth Century has three parts, but the Dutch stuff is split into three.
Italy (68 pages, 110 pictures) –> Seventeenth_Century_Italy. This file includes the Frenchmen Claude and Poussin as they lived in Rome (there is much cut from Poussin). Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, Bernini (quite a bit cut here, including his church of San Andrea al Quirinale where he used to rest from his troubles), Borromini, Pietro da Cortona, Gaulli and Andrea Pozzo.
Spain and the Catholic North (60 pages, 103 pictures) –> Seventeenth_Century_Spain_CatholicN. Jusepe de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbaran, Diego Velazquez, Murillo, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Georges de la Tour, the French Academy and later trends.
Dutch Golden Age (54 pages, 85 pics) –> Dutch_Golden. Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch. Still life and architectural paintings are included but there are separate documents on …
… Rembrandt (34 pages, 47 pics) –> Rembrandt. My original notes have not been cut down as much here to preserve the story. There are a few pages made up wholly of text (no! the horror!!)
… Dutch Landscapes (42 pages, 66 pics) –> Dutch_Landscapes. Jan van Goyen, Salomon Ruysdael, Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp.
Eighteenth Century has three parts.
France (89 pages, 123 pics) –> Eighteenth Century France. Antoine Watteau, Francois Boucher, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, Jean-Etienne Liotard, and Jean Baptiste Greuze. History painting in the years before and during the Revolution: Jacques-Louis David with Neo-Classicism covered and including Antonio Canova.
Italy (56 pages, 65 pics) –>Eighteenth Century Italy. Sebastiano Ricci, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Canaletto and Francesco Guardi.
Britain (68 pages, 95 pics) –>Eighteenth Century Britain. William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs and Joseph Wright of Derby.
An Occasional Cricket Statistician 