Arts · Full roadmap · ~90 min read · 27 steps
🖼️Art history for the curious beginner
Look at any painting and name its era, movement, and tricks
Activities in this path
Skill tree
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Unit 1
Start here
Course overview
How to look at a painting
Looking is a skill, not a reaction
Composition: where your eye goes
Artists steer your eye on purpose
Light, color, and line
Three dials that set the entire mood
Cave and ancient art
Art is older than writing
Unit 2
Egyptian art
Rules that held for 3,000 years
Greek and Roman art
The body, idealized then made real
Medieval and Byzantine art
Flat, golden, and aimed at heaven
Giotto and the first cracks
One painter starts making people look real again
Perspective and Masaccio
The math that opens a window into the wall
Unit 3
The High Renaissance: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael
Three giants, three strengths
The Northern Renaissance
Oil paint and obsessive detail
A non-Western window: Japanese ukiyo-e
Flat color, bold line, everyday life
Baroque: Caravaggio and Rembrandt
Drama, spotlight, and deep shadow
Rococo and Neoclassicism
From whipped cream to cold marble
Unit 4
Romanticism
Feeling over reason, nature over order
Realism
Paint what is actually in front of you
Impressionism
Catching the light before it changes
Post-Impressionism: van Gogh and Cézanne
Keep the color, add structure and feeling
A non-Western window: African art and modernism
Masks that reset Western painting
Unit 5
Early modernism: Cubism and Matisse
Breaking the rules of space and color
Dada and Surrealism
Nonsense as protest, dreams as subject
Abstract Expressionism
The painting is the action
Pop Art
The supermarket enters the museum
Contemporary and conceptual art
When the idea becomes the artwork
Unit 6
Putting it together: reading any painting
Your full toolkit, in order
Where to go next
Where to go next