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For the sixteenth-century Italian writer and painter Giorgio Vasari, a dark period in human history ended when God took pity on humankind and brought about a reform of painting. Vasari wrote in his Lives of the Artists of 1550 that the naturalism of Tuscan painters like Giotto di Bondone in the early fourteenth century was a miracle, a gift to humankind to bring about an end to the stiff, formal, unnatural Byzantine style that had held sway before that time. Today, we recognise that it was hardly by chance or divine mercy that such a change occurred in artmaking. The development of crisp, effective narrative, convincing spatial representation, and the introduction of corporeal, realistic figures possessing physical presence are all aspects of painting echoing the changes in European culture that were beginning to take hold by the fourteenth century and later, and which found their most forcible expression in Italy. Set against a social revolution in which traders, manufacturers and bankers were gaining in prominence, painters were responding to the growing demand for clear, naturalistic representation in art. The monumental works of the Florentine Giotto and the elegant, finely wrought naturalism in the paintings of the Sienese Duccio di Buoninsegna were but one part of a larger cultural movement. It also comprised: the moving, vernacular writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; the vivid travel-adventure of Marco Polo; the growing influence of nominalism in philosophy, which encouraged real, tangible and sensate knowledge; and the religious devotion of Saint Francis of Assisi, who found God’s presence not in ideas and verbal speculation but in the chirping of birds and the glow of the sun and moon.

What the primi lumi, the ‘first lights’, in the art of painting had commenced by the fourteenth century was continued in the fifteenth century with ever greater sharpness and thoroughness, and with a new historical sense that caused them to look back before the Middle Ages to the world of the classical civilisations. Italians came to admire, almost worship, the ancient Greeks and Romans, for their wisdom and insight, and for their artistic as well as scholarly achievements. A new kind of intellectual, the humanist, fuelled a cultural revolution in the fifteenth century. A humanist was a scholar of ancient letters, and humanism was the broader attitude they fostered: a belief in the value of a thoughtful study of Nature, a faith in the potentiality of humankind, and a sense that secular, moral beliefs were necessary to supplement the limited tenets of Christianity. Above all, the humanists encouraged the belief that ancient civilisation was the apex of culture and one should be in a dialogue with the writers and artists of the classical world. The result was the Renaissance, the rebirth, of Greco-Roman culture. The panels, paintings and murals of Masaccio and Piero dell Francesca captured the moral firmness of ancient Roman sculptural figures, and these artists strove to show their actors as part of our world: the Renaissance perspective system is based on a single vanishing point and carefully worked out transversal lines, resulting in a spatial coherence not seen since antiquity, if ever. Even more clearly indebted to antiquity were the paintings of the northern Italian prodigy Andrea Mantegna. His archaeological studies of antique costumes, architecture, figural poses, and inscriptions resulted in the most thoroughly consistent attempt by any painter up to his time to give new life to the vanished Greco-Roman civilisation. Even a painter like Alessandro Botticelli, whose art evokes a dreamy spirit that had survived from the late Gothic style, created paintings with Venuses, Cupids, and nymphs that responded to the subject matter of the ancients and appealed to contemporary viewers touched by humanism.

It would be better to think of ‘Renaissances’ rather than a single Renaissance. This is demonstrated no more clearly than by looking at the art of the leading painters of the High Renaissance. Giorgio Vasari saw these masters as all setting out to create an art greater than Nature, as idealists who improved on reality rather than imitating it, and who thoughtfully suggested reality rather than delineating it for us in every particular detail. We recognise in these painters different embodiments of the cultural aspirations of the time. Leonardo da Vinci, trained as a painter, was equally at home in his role as a scientist, and he incorporated into art his research into the human body, plant forms, geology, and psychology. Michelangelo Buonarroti, trained as a sculptor, turned to painting and expressed his deep theological and philosophical beliefs, especially the idealism of Neoplatonism. His muscular, over-scaled and intense heroes could hardly differ any more from the graceful, smiling, supple figures of Leonardo. Raphael of Urbino was the ultimate courtier, whose paintings embody the grace, charm and sophistication of life at Renaissance courts. Giorgione and Titian, both Venetian masters, expressed with their colourism and free brushwork an epicurean sense of life, their art finding no better subject matter than in luxurious landscapes and sumptuous female nudes. All the sixteenth-century painters tried to improve on Nature, to create something greater or more beautiful than nature itself. Titian’s motto Natura Potentior Ars, ‘Art More Powerful than Nature’, could be the philosophy of all the sixteenth-century artists.

Among the achievements of the Italian Renaissance painters was that they had established their intellectual credentials. Rather than being considered as mere handicraftsmen, artists – some of whom, such as Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, were themselves writers on this subject – made a bid to be considered on a par with other thinkers of their time. The profession of painting experienced a sharp rise in its critical fortunes in Renaissance Italy. Michelangelo, for example, was called Il Divino, ‘the Divine’, and a kind of cult sprang up around leading painters and other artists of the time. Already in 1435, Alberti urged painters to associate themselves with men of letters and mathematicians, and this paid off. The present-day inclusion of “studio art” in university curricula has its origins in the new attitude to painting that arose in Italy during the Renaissance. By the sixteenth century, rather than only commissioning particular works, art patrons across the peninsula were happy to get their hands on any product of the great individual artists: acquiring ‘a Raphael’, ‘a Michelangelo’, or ‘a Titian’ was a goal in itself, whatever the work in question.

While the Italians of the Renaissance had turned to highly organised spatial settings and idealised figural types, the northern Europeans focused on everyday reality, on optical sensations, and on the variety of life on earth. No painter has ever surpassed the Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck in his close observation of surfaces, and no one has ever seen and captured more clearly and poetically the glint of light on a pearl, the deep, resonant colours of a red cloth, or the glinting reflections that appear in glass and on metal. Scientific observation was one form of realism, while another was the intense interest at the time in the bodies of saints and on the anatomical details of the Passion of Christ. This was the age of religious theatre, when actors, dressed as biblical characters, acted out in churches and on the streets the detail of Christ’s suffering and death. It is not coincidence this was also the period when masters such as Netherlandish Rogier van der Weyden and German Matthias Grünewald painted, sometimes with excruciating clarity, the wounds, streams of blood, and pathetic countenance of the crucified Christ. The northern masters carried out their pictorial research with a skilled use of oil painting technique, a medium in which they remained in the forefront in European art until the Italians joined them only in the later fifteenth century.

Spanning north and south during the Renaissance period was the art of Albrecht Dürer of Nuremburg. He followed the Italian penchant for canonical measure of the human body and perspective, even if he retained a form of sharp expressionism of line and emotional representation that was widespread in German art. While he shared the artistic optimism of the idealistic Italians, many other northern painters retained a sense of pessimism about the human condition. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s essay on the Dignity of Man presaged Michelangelo’s belief in the perfectibility and essential beauty of the human body and soul. For their part, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Sebastian Brant’s satiric poem Ship of Fools were part of the same northern European cultural milieu that produced the fantastic follies of humankind shown in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights triptych and Pieter Brueghel’s raucous peasant scenes. There was hope for humankind in Paradise, but little consolation on earth for beings consumed by their passions and caught in a cycle of desire and fruitless yearning. Northern humanists, like their Italian counterparts, called for the classical virtues of moderation, restraint, and harmony and the pictures of Brueghel represented the very vices against which they warned. Unlike some of the contemporary Romanists, who had travelled from the Netherlands to Italy and been inspired by Michelangelo and other artists of the time, Brueghel travelled to Rome around 1550 but remained largely untouched by its art. He turned to local inspiration and staged his scenes amidst humble settings, earning him the undeserved nickname of “Peasant Brueghel”. He was a herald of the realism and bluntness of the northern European Baroque.

The great intellectual revolt set in motion by theologians Martin Luther and John Calvin in the sixteenth century led to an attempt by the Catholic Church to respond to the challenge of the Protestants. Various Church Councils called for a reform of the Roman Catholic Church. In the arts, the participants at the Council of Trent declared that art should be simple and accessible to the broad public. A number of Italian painters, however, whom we know as Mannerists, had instead been practising an artistry that was complex in subject matter and style. Painters eventually responded to ecclesiastical needs as well as to the ennui that necessitated a response to Mannerist stylistic formulae. We call this new era the age of the Baroque, which was ushered in initially by Caravaggio. He painted what he saw in front of him, in the most realistic if dramatically dark and theatrically concentrated manner possible, and he gained a following among the popular masses as well as with connoisseurs and even with Church officials, who were at first sceptical of his overly realistic treatment of sacred subject matter. Caravaggism swept across Italy and then the rest of Europe, and a host of painters came to adopt and adapt his chiaroscuro and his suppression of flashy colouring; his earthy and sincere actors struck a chord with viewers across the Continent who had tired of some of the artificialities of sixteenth-century art.

In addition to the Caravaggism of the early Baroque, another form of painting later called the High Baroque soon developed; the most dramatic, dynamic, and painterly of styles hitherto developed. Many of its painters built on the foundation laid by the Venetians of the sixteenth century. Peter Paul Rubens, an admirer of Titian, painted huge canvases with fleshy figures, rich landscapes, broken brushwork, and flickering light and dark. His pictorial experiments were the starting points for the art of his countrymen Jacob Jordaens and Anthony van Dyck, the latter of whom had a great following among the European elite for his noble portrait manner. Rubens brought back the world of antiquity, painting on his canvases ancient gods, goddesses and human sea creatures, but his style was anything but classical. He found a ready market for his works among the European aristocrats, who liked his bombastic flattery, and among Catholic patrons of religious art, who found in his extroverted sacred scenes another weapon in Counter-Reformation ideology. In Rome itself, the sculptor Bernini was Ruben’s counterpart, as the Catholic Church had in these two champions of Faith a means to show the power and majesty of the Church and the Papacy. The Italian Baroque painters let loose a torrent of holy figures on the ceilings of the churches of Rome and other cities, with the skies opening up to reveal Heaven itself and God’s personal acceptance of the martyrs and mystics of the world of Catholic sainthood. The Spanish painters Velásquez, Murillo, and Zurburán took up the style in their native land, perhaps calming the physical movements and open brushwork, but sharing with the Italians a mystical sense of light and the Catholic iconographic subject matter.

How different from all this were the paintings of seventeenth-century Holland! Having effectively freed themselves from Habsburg Spain by the 1580s, the Dutch practised a tolerant form of Calvinism, which eschewed religious iconography. A growing middle class and an increasingly wealthy upper class were present to buy the delightful variety of secular paintings produced by a host of skilled painters, with individual artists specialising in moonlit landscapes, skating scenes, ships at sea, tavern scenes, and a great variety of other subjects. From this large school of artists several individual painters stand out. Jacob van Ruisdael was the closest we have to a High Baroque landscape painter in Holland, his dark and sometimes stormy landscapes evoking the drama and movement so widespread in European art of the time. Frans Hals’ painting, with flashy, quick strokes of the brush and exaggerated colouration of skin and garments, also, like Ruisdael’s, approaches a more pan-European sensibility of the High Baroque. In contrast, Jan Steen typified the widespread realism and local quality of most Dutch art of the Golden Age, and he added a moral slant in his depiction of households in disarray and misbehaving peasants. Finally, the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn stand alone, even from the Dutch. Raised as a Calvinist, he shared some beliefs with the Mennonites, and he was happy to depart from the Calvinist stricture against representing biblical scenes. His later paintings, with their quiet introspection, make the perfect Protestant counterpart to the showy, dynamic, Roman Catholic paintings of Rubens. While working early on in a tighter technique influenced by the Dutch “fine painters,” Rembrandt developed a broad, shadowy manner derived from Caravaggio but expressed with much greater pictorial complexity. This style fell out of favour among the Dutch, but Rembrandt held his ground, going bankrupt though leaving a legacy that would be admired by Romantics and those modernists with a penchant for painterly abstraction. Rembrandt also stood out because of the universality of his art. He was steeped in knowledge of other styles and in literary sources. Although he never travelled to Italy, he was an artistic sponge, and he included in his works bits inspired by the late Gothic artist Antonio Pisanello and the Renaissance masters Mantegna, Raphael and Dürer. He constantly evolved, and he had the broadest artistic mind and deepest understanding of the human condition of any painter of his age.

Clearly, just as there were many ‘Renaissances’ in art, there were many forms of the Baroque, and the High Baroque was challenged by the Classical Baroque, which had its philosophical roots in ancient thought and its stylistic basis in the paintings of Raphael and other High Renaissance classicists. Annibale Carracci had embraced a classical approach, and painters like Andrea Sacchi challenged the supremacy in Rome of High Baroque painters like Pietro da Cortona. However, the most quintessential classicist of the seventeenth century was the Frenchman Nicolas Poussin, who developed a style perfectly suited to the growing ranks of philosophical Stoics in France, Italy, and elsewhere. His solid, idealised figures, endowed with broad physical movements and firm moral purpose, acted out a range of narratives, both sacred and secular. Another Frenchman developed a different form of classicism: the epicurean paintings of Claude Lorrain at first seem to differ sharply from those of Poussin, as Claude’s pictures melt edges away, his waters ripple subtly, and hazy views into infinity appear in the distance. Yet, both painters conveyed a sense of moderation and balance, and appealed to similar kinds of patrons. All these painters of the seventeenth century, whether classical in temperament or not, participated in the explosion of subject matter of the time; not since antiquity had artmaking seen such a diversity of iconography of both sacred and profane subjects. With the exploration of new continents, contact with new and different peoples across the globe, and novel views offered by telescopes and microscopes, the world seemed to be a changing, evolving and fractured place, and the diversity of artistic styles and pictorial subject matter reflected this dynamism.

Louis XIV (d. 1715), the self-designated Sun King who modelled himself after Apollo and Alexander the Great, favoured the classical mode of Poussin and of painters such as his court artist Charles Le Brun, who, in turn, favoured the king with a number of murky paintings glorifying his reign. There arose in the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century a debate over style in which painters allied themselves with one of two camps, the Poussinistes and the Rubénistes. The former favoured classicism, linearity, and moderation, while the latter group declared the innate primacy of free colouring, energetic movement, and compositional dynamism. When Louis XIV died, the field in France was open, and the Rubénistes took the lead, bringing forth a style we call Rococo, which – roughly translated – means “pebblework Baroque,” a decorative brand of the painterly Baroque. Rather than being a continuation of the style of Rubens, the manner of Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher conveyed a lighter mood, with more feathery strokes of the brush, a lighter palette, and even a smaller physical size of works. Erotic subject matter and light genre subjects came to dominate the style, which found favour especially among the pleasure-loving aristocrats of France, as well as their peers elsewhere in Continental Europe. The Rococo painters thus carried forward the debate between line and colour that had emerged in practice and in art theory in the sixteenth century: the argument between Michelangelo and Titian, and then between Rubens and Poussin, is a struggle that would not go away, and would return in the nineteenth century and later.

Not every artist succumbed to the Rococo. A focus in the eighteenth century on particular social virtues – patriotism, moderation, duty to family, the necessity to embrace Reason and study the laws of Nature – were themselves at odds with the subject matter and hedonistic style of the Rococo painters. In the realm of art theory and criticism, Diderot and Voltaire were unhappy with the Rococo style flourishing in France, and the days of the style were numbered. The humble naturalism of the Frenchman Chardin was based in Dutch still-life artistry of the previous century, and the Anglo-American and English painters, including John Singleton Copley of Boston, Joseph Wright of Derby and Thomas Hogarth painted in styles which, in different ways, embodied a kind of fundamental naturalism we recognise as fitting for the spirit of the age. A number of artists, such as Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Thomas Gainsborough, incorporated into their paintings some of the lightness of touch that characterized the Rococo, but they modified its excesses and avoided some of its artificial and superficial qualities, however delightful those are.

A leitmotif of Western painting has been the persistence of classicism, and here the Rococo found its fiercest opponent. The essentials of the classical style – a dynamic equilibrium, an idealised naturalism, a measured harmony, a restraint of colour and a dominance of line, all operating under the guiding influence of ancient Greek and Roman models – reasserted themselves in the late-eighteenth century in response to the Rococo. When Jacques-Louis David exhibited his Oath of the Horatii in 1785, it electrified the public, and was applauded by the French including the King, and an international viewership. Thomas Jefferson happened to be in Paris at the time of the painting’s exhibition and he was greatly impressed. The popularity of Neoclassicism preceded the French Revolution, but once the revolution occurred, it became the official style of the virtuous new French regime. The Rococo was associated with the decadent Ancien Régime, and its painters were forced to flee the country or change their styles. A later Neoclassicism remained in vogue in France through the Napoleonic age, and the elegant linearity and exotic attitude of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres took the place of the works of David, who had softened his style later in life to create a copious, more decorative form of classicism suitable for the less bourgeois character of the French Empire.

If the eighteenth century was the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, there was, developing at the same moment, an intellectual trend towards interest in the irrational and the emotional. A group of painters, sometimes regarded together under the term Romantics, flourished in the late-eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. Many of these painters co-existed chronologically with the classical artists, and there was a certain amount of rivalry between them. Some of the European painters from the last half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century were explicitly interested in the irrational, as was Henry Fuseli in his Nightmare and Francisco Goya in some of his violent or black paintings and their scenes of death and madness. Théodore Géricault explored medical insanity in some of his smaller paintings and the themes of death, cannibalism, and political corruption in his massive and turgid Raft of the Medusa. More subtle were the painters in this period who explored the emotional effects of landscape art. John Constable’s flickering light and careful study of clouds and the sunlight on trees in the English countryside yielded strikingly emotive results. The German Caspar David Friedrich conveyed the religious mysticism of the landscape, while the American Hudson River School painters, such as Thomas Cole, represented the warm autumnal colours and desolation of a wilderness in the New World that was quickly disappearing. J. M. W. Turner’s paintings of seascapes, landscapes, and historical scenes seemed to his contemporaries to be made of “tinted steam,” and he edged towards modernism in his abstractness. The most influential and acclaimed of the French Romantic painters was Eugene Delacroix. He turned to the High Baroque painter Rubens for artistic inspiration and painted canvas after canvas of tiger hunts, Passion of Christ imagery, and – for contemporary taste – the exotic world of Arab warriors and hunters in northern Africa. Like the Baroque masters before him, he used zooming spatial diagonals, cut-off compositional elements, and bravura colourism with great effect. Delacroix gained the artistic and even personal enmity of Ingres, and contemporaries recognised in their art the timeless struggle of line versus colour.

The kind of anti-Romantic realism in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary found expression in the art of the school of Realist painters. Gustave Courbet’s unadorned representation of Nature and of village life stands as his attempt to show us the world without elaboration. His statement “show me an angel and I will paint one” is the sentiment which led to the creation of his monumental Burial at Ornans, a carefully composed work that he and critics of the time convinced themselves was little more than raw réalité. More traditional, but also based on close observation of nature, were the paintings of Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School painters, led by Theodore Rousseau. Among the other Realists were Honoré Daumier, who concerned his efforts with contemporary urban life and in depicting the folly of civic officials and lawyers, the natural goodness of labourers, and the weariness of the poor. Contemporary in time with the French Realists were the English Pre-Raphaelite painters, who turned their backs on the artful idealism they associated with the Academy; they found inspiration instead in the detailed particularism and ‘honesty’ of painting in Italy before Raphael and the High Renaissance. Dante, Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones found solace in exotic stories of the Middle Ages, in accounts of early British history, and in all manner of moralising tales and parables. They painted with oils, but with the care of tempera paints, without the broad treatment of the brush, the scumbling of the colours across the canvas, and the rapid glazing technique that the oil medium makes possible. They would not be the last painters in the West to reject the pictorial possibilities of oil paint, or to defy the conventions of the academies of art from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

As urbanism and industrialism advanced in nineteenth-century Europe, a new and unexpected development occurred in painting with the rise of Impressionism. Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and others in their circle painted with rapid strokes and with an insubstantiality never before seen in painting. Sometimes capturing the idylls of the countryside and at other times capturing the light, smoke, colour, and movement of urban scenes, they turned their backs on the historical and concentrated instead on conveying the evanescence of present appearances. Rejected at first by critics and the public because of their insouciance with academic rules, the Impressionists had a lasting impact on art. As their styles developed, the modernity of their art became even more apparent. Monet’s canvases became extremely abstract, and he came to finish his pictures, not in front of the visual source, but in his studio, sometimes long after contact with the natural model. Renoir eventually sought to represent the firm linearity he had discovered in Italian art, and his works became ever more planned in design, firmly based on figural models, and sugary sweet in colouring. The traditionalist painters Jean-Léon Gérôme and William Bouguereau in France and Ilya Repin in Russia achieved worldly success and acclaim with their more academic and conservative approaches, but the Impressionists had the greatest impact on the development of modernism, and their artistry soon inspired new branches of painting.

The Post-Impressionists were a group of artists who understood the potentialities of the way the Impressionists used the brush. Paul Cézanne was determined to make “something permanent” of the art of the Impressionists, endowing his pictures with the compositional solidity he found in classicism. He was intent on “redoing Poussin after Nature,” and he developed a rough kind of classicism that, at the same time, broke down barriers by obscuring the edges of things and by making the paint surface an end in itself, with its own lighting, texture, and colouring. Vincent van Gogh built on Impressionism and imbued it with his mystical spirit. Paul Gauguin sought subject matter in the primitive areas of France and the South Pacific and painted with patches of sometimes barely mediated colours. Georges Seurat’s art theory returned to some of the rhetoric of early Impressionism, as he set out to give an impression of reality through his novel technique. In his case, it was based on points of colour and optical mixing of colours to create the sense of reality, except that, like Cézanne, he gave his figures an almost neoclassical calm, presence, and moral gravitas.

The explosion of styles that had set in during the later nineteenth century continued in the twentieth century. The freedom and individualism of modernism found expression in a riot of painting styles. Thinkers in a number of fields in the early-twentieth century discovered the essential instability of form and existence: atonalism in music, the theory of relativity in physics, and the destabilising tendencies of psychoanalysis all pointed to a world of subjectivity and shifting viewpoints. For their part, the Cubists, led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, systematically broke down (“analysed”) reality in their Analytic Cubism, almost eliminating colour, direction of light, texture, and even the singularity of viewpoint and, for a while, they turned completely away from narrative in favour of immobile subjects of still-life and portraiture. In the history of styles, it can be said that the Cubists demolished the Renaissance project – a project accepted by the Academic painters of the nineteenth century – of constructing a spatial box in which meaningful events unfold with convincing space, colour and light. Never painting in a pure, non-representational abstraction, the Cubists relied for artistic success on the tension between what one sees and what one expected to see. Picasso, who had earlier painted in an academic narrative manner as a youth and in poetic and rather representational Blue and Pink periods, later experimented almost endlessly, at times dabbling with Primitivism, Neoclassicism, and Surrealism. Not since Giotto had a single painter done more to change the field of his art. The works of the French painter Fernand Léger and the Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp were by-products of the styles of Picasso and Braque, an expansion of an idea into more dynamic settings of figures in an architectural environment.

Picasso’s art was often witty and clever. A good deal of twentieth-century painting was more serious, and works like Picasso’s Guernica, portraying the tragedy of war, were his own advance away from the playfulness of his early Cubist styles. Surrealist art, such as the dream paintings of Salvador Dalí, or the forbidding settings of the works of Giorgio de Chirico, capture some of the alienation and psychological intensity of modern life. The Futurists, Italian painters beholden to the Cubists, turned to dynamic, even violent movement in their paintings, and their art presaged the unpleasant mixture of modernism, urbanism, and aggression that, not by coincidence, fuelled the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. Quite unlike the outwardly intense Futurists, some modernists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries included a group of painters set on exploring inner subjectivity, and the period of civilisation that gave us Freud and Jung was bound to include a group of painters willing to explore the psychological states of the human race. Edvard Munch’s psychological insight and expressionism were matched in their intensity perhaps only by those of the German painters Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde. A religious sentiment, also deeply emotive, flourished during this time in the abstracted art of the Catholic Georges Rouault and the Jewish Marc Chagall.

Modernists rejected tradition in architecture, literature and music, and painting was no different. The rise of abstraction has been much heralded, but it is arguable that no such thing is possible. The Dutchman Piet Mondrian saw in his abstractions various theological, gender, and existential categories, and his Broadway Boogie Woogie is suggestively titled. Kasimir Malevitch’s abstract, geometric paintings carried ontological and divine connotations, while Wassily Kandinsky’s abstractions are fraught with mysticism and secret messages. Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist drip paintings contained in them a strong human presence in the very kinesthetic style itself, and he labelled his works with telling titles such as Autumn Rhythm and Lucifer. The Dutch-born Willem De Kooning’s canvases are filled with an explosive and frantic application of the paint, often illustrating highly charged subject matter. Mark Rothko’s fields of bleeding colours sprang from the artist’s philosophical notions, and he wanted his viewers to be deeply moved by his pictures. Colour and shape had come to fill the gap left by the departure of the Virgin Mary and martyred saints, classical gods and triumphant generals of earlier artmaking. The older technique of oil painting was supplemented in the twentieth century with new or reborn substances: acrylic, aluminum paints, encaustic, enamel, and other binding agents, with the occasional quotidian object mixed in or glued onto the surface for good measure.

A reaction to the psychological intensity of the Abstract Expressionists was inevitable, and it took two forms. One was in a new objectivity and minimalism, championed by sculptors such as Donald Judd and David Smith, but also painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, who set out to take a good deal of the human emotion, mysticism, and moral subjectivity out of painting. Another response was found in Pop Art, which vividly brought back the represented object, often in mirthful ways. Andy Warhol’s soup cans, the collages of Richard Hamilton, and the comic book style of Roy Lichtenstein, works often carried in large scale, were serious in their intents. The commercial products of modern societies come spilling out on to the canvases of the Pop Artists, who ask us to consider the nature of consumerism and mass production as well as issues of artistic representation.

In the end, painting has triumphed in Western art over a host of opponents. In the Renaissance, the debate raged over the paragone, that is, the comparison of the visual arts, and Michelangelo and his camp proclaimed that sculpture was more real, more literally tangible, and less deceptive than painting. Leonardo and others fought back, with words and deeds, and one can argue that painting remained the preeminent art from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. It is telling that the average viewer can only name a few prominent sculptors of the Renaissance, but might easily name a small army of painters from that period. The same is true of the nineteenth century: in the nineteenth-century French context, for example, beyond Rodin, and perhaps Carpeaux and Barye, the sculptors are paled by the schools of painters who came forth with innovative ideas. Painting has overcome the cheap supply of prints that flooded the markets beginning in the fifteenth century, the attempts by some Baroque artists to merge painting with other visual arts, the promise of greater verisimilitude claimed by photography in the nineteenth century, and the competition offered by moving pictures in the twentieth. Digital media threaten a challenge once again in the early twenty-first century. But painting is too powerfully present, too flexible in results, and too rooted in our sensibilities to give way easily to upstarts. Even in practical terms, paintings can be rolled up and shipped, or when not in use they can be stacked, while, on the other hand, they can fill a blank wall or a ceiling with great effect. You cannot turn a painting off with a switch or an easy click of the mouse. They are flat, like the pages of our books and the screens on our computers, and can be reproduced in a compatible, two-dimensional format, without necessitating the difficult decisions of lighting called for in the reproduction of sculpture or with the questions of viewpoint as in the photography of architecture. Renaissance thinkers said a painter can exercise divine powers and, like God himself, create an entire world, and thousands of different pictorial worlds have been created since then.

The works chosen for this book demonstrate the variety of great painting to be found in our public museums. Surely, painting continues to have a lasting appeal in a changing world. Will the field continue to produce masterpieces? That is a more difficult question to answer. The works collected here indicate that physical craftsmanship is an important component of successful painting. It is also clear that painters succeed when they “stand on the shoulders of giants” and respond to art of the past, be it in admiration or in rebellion. Perhaps the world is awaiting the next great painter who, like Raphael, Rembrandt, and Picasso is steeped in the art of the past, and has the knowledge, sincerity, and technical skills to create something new and outstanding. If painters of the future produce works that are little more than sarcastic one-liners, or are by nature ephemeral in form and meaning, or disdain or ignore the whole of the history of art, the field of painting has little hope of success. However, manual skill and a determination to create a novel yet savvy work of art can go a long way towards preserving the art form. The pages of this book contain, without setting out to do so, a blueprint for painting’s future.

Joseph Manca