A Brief History of Fine Art

It goes without saying that people have been creating painting artwork for millennia. The 30,000-year-old cave paintings that were found in the Chauvet Cave in France stand as a testimony to this statement. However, it wasn’t until the arrival of aesthetics – the viewpoint towards beauty and creative taste that people began differentiating between traditional fine art, which was artworks that were created purely to appease aesthetic senses and applied art, which includes artistic objects that were created to serve a practical purpose.



With the passage of time, especially during the period of Enlightenment, finer merits were made and set of rules and standards were created for fine art. However, as time passed and new art movements challenged the norms of traditional paintings, these lines were again blurred. The new age of artists started mixing classical traditions with styles and techniques that were considered by some of the artists and art critics as primitive.

There is no denial to the fact that though several talented artists created delicate paintings prior to the commencement of European Renaissance, some of the most influential painters in the history of traditional fine art rose to success during that period and shaped the landscape of traditional paintings for the upcoming centuries. Among the most eminent artists of these comes the name of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian and Botticelli.

The later centuries witnessed various art movements like Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, among others and changed the course of fascinating traditional paintings. Each art movement brought with it a unique style of painting and with it emerged some of the greatest artists of the world. While the likes of Caravaggio, Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Rubens belonged to the era of Baroque, Rococo gave the art worlds two eminent artists Fragonard and Boucher. During Neoclassicism David and Ingres rose to fame, while Turner, Constable, Gericault, Goya, and Delacroix belonged to the Romanticism. World famous painters Monet, Seurat, Degas and Cezanne emerged during Impressionism. Surrealism introduced us to the likes of Magritte, Dali, and Ernst and Abstract Expressionism gave birth to the likes of Gorky, Rothko and Pollock. Warhol, Johns, Hockney and Lichtenstein were all new age Pop Artists. Modern age eminent contemporary fine art painters include very talented and critically acclaimed Peter Doig, Zhang Xiaogang, David Hockney and Gerhard Richter.

Nowadays, the fine art category of paintings covers a wider collection of paintings than the category did in earlier times, although the confusion is still there as to what styles and genres can be termed as piece of fine art.