Art History, Culture, and Context
Organizing the survey
Build a timeline around three questions per period: who paid, what was depicted, and how it looked. Prehistoric: cave painting, carved figures, unknown function. Ancient Egypt: canonical proportion, profile head with frontal shoulders, afterlife purpose. Greece: contrapposto, idealization, red- and black-figure pottery. Rome: veristic portraiture, concrete, arch and vault. Byzantine: gold ground, frontal hieratic figures, iconoclasm. Islamic: aniconism, geometry, calligraphy, arabesque. Medieval Europe: Romanesque weight and tympana versus Gothic pointed arches, flying buttresses, stained glass. Renaissance: linear perspective, humanism, chiaroscuro, with Northern artists emphasizing oil technique and minute detail. Baroque: tenebrism, diagonal drama, Counter-Reformation patronage. Neoclassical: reason and archaeological restraint; Romanticism: emotion and sublime nature. Realism: ordinary labor. Impressionism: optical color, broken brushwork, modern life. Post-Impressionism: structure or expression over optical accuracy. Cubism: multiple viewpoints; Futurism: speed; Dada: anti-art; Surrealism: the unconscious; Abstract Expressionism: gesture and scale; Pop: mass media; Minimalism: industrial repetition.
Traps
Attribution questions usually supply formal fingerprints rather than wall text, so learn two or three visual markers per movement. Do not confuse Neoclassical order with Romantic emotion, or Impressionist color with Post-Impressionist structure. Distrust absolute claims such as the first to, and remember that non-Western traditions have internal chronologies, not merely influence on the West.
Rule of thumb
For an unknown image, run a quick filter: material (oil, fresco, print), space (flat, perspectival, stacked), and figure treatment (idealized, expressive, distorted). Then match to a period.