A Brief History of Art Movements | Behind the Masterpiece

by Panzer
The first piece of visual art in history is from 40,000 years ago.
Even before the existence of written language, our Neanderthal ancestors made some of the
earliest images we have.
The need to create is a part of being human.
It’s as old as our species; as innate as any other desire, the need to eat, to seek
protection, to love.
Many of us think of art and our minds immediately jump to a framed painting or kneeling statue
in a museum.
Thinking it’s too nuanced and convoluted to understand.
It's intimidating.
But art is not just for the ones seeking it out.
It’s for anyone who wants to experience it.
It’s not a luxury.
Really, Art is anything that stirs emotion in us.
When I first began learning about art history, I wanted to know one thing above all — the timeline.
The idea of progress through the years is intriguing.
And the evolution of art goes hand in hand with advancements in technology, expansion
of knowledge, and the growth of society over the years.
If we want to know more about who we are as a society today, we should look back.
Before the development of written language, humans were creating cave paintings, and rock
engravings as a way to share information between themselves and other tribes.
This was a time when human survival was the only priority and so the art from this period
reflected that; depicting stick figures and animals often in scenes of the hunt.
The exception to this art movement is the "Venus of Willendorf."
A small sculpture of a nude woman with exaggerated features of fertility.
Very little is known about its origins but many researchers believe it to be a fertility Goddess.
During a period of time where most evidence about human behavior was purely survival
through the tools we’ve found, the art we’ve since discovered is a clear indication of
symbolic and abstract thought; a beginning to all art movements.
During this time, advanced civilization throughout Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Persian, China
and Rome were becoming more literate and so started creating the earliest naturalistic
images of human beings.
In these societies, art played an important role as a means of enforcing religious and
political ideologies.
It included symbolic imagery, mythological stories, and text to tell stories of gods, and rulers.
Look at this, this is one of the most famous artworks from this period.
the “Code of Hammurabi.”
It’s a piece of stone, carved with a set of laws and an image of the kind Hammurabi, and
the Mesopotamian god Shabash.