Western Art History
Explore Western Art History, covering major movements, key artists, and critical analysis of artworks from antiquity to modern times.
Western Arts refer to the literary, performing, and visual arts rooted in European cultural traditions, including those in the U.S. and Canada. These arts trace their origins to ancient Greece and Rome, later shaped by Christianity and spread globally. During the Renaissance, European styles influenced the Americas, blending with local cultures. Over time, Western arts became characterized by the ability to transcend national boundaries, though they retained some national distinctions. Key forms include architecture, painting, music, and literature.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Western arts". Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Sep. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/art/Western-arts. Accessed 9 October 2024.
The Oxford Companion to Western Art by
This work replaces Harold Osborne's Oxford Companion to Art (1970), which has been continuously in print for thirty years. Though originally commissioned as a new edition of Osborne's book, it is effectively a completely new work, planned and written afresh for new generations of art lovers. Apart from a handful of classic articles by Harold Osborne mainly on aesthetics, and a few others which needed only minor change, the text is entirely new. Unlike Osborne, it focuses on Western art rather than the whole of world art, concentrating primarily on painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts, leaving architecture to be covered separately. With not only a tighter focus but also a greater extent than Osborne's, the new Companion offers far deeper coverage of the subject than previously; it includes many more artists and their works, and also pays proper attention to new topics of interest focused on patronage, taste, theory and criticism, materials and techniques, and the new art history. There are over 2600 entries, alphabetically arranged. Almost half of them cover artists, from classical times to the twentieth century. Other entries discuss art styles and movements, art forms (such as battle painting, landscape, caricature, or stained glass), specialist terms, and materials and techniques in all media. There is strong emphasis on location as a focus for art: not only are there regional and cultural surveys, but also entries on specific places of importance such as Paris or Urbino; and, in addition, entries on museums and galleries are arranged under the their city headword so that the reader can easily survey the major sites within a particular locality, such as New York, Boston, or Madrid. Patronage receives imaginative treatment: here, rather than focusing on a limited number of individual patrons, the Companion has entries on towns and cities as centres of patronage and collecting - such as Nuremberg, Dresden, or Prague. In addition, there is a novel series of entries on the critical fortunes of the art of the major European countries, covering, for example, patronage and collecting of Italian art in France, Spain, Britain, Germany and Central Europe, the USA, and in Italy itself. A further category of entry covers topics in the theory of art, such as iconography, perspective, and synaesthesia; and there is wide-ranging coverage too of art scholarship and criticism from Aristotle and Pausanius to Sartre, Panofsky, and Michel Foucault. All this is supplemented by entries on general topics as varied as reproduction, anatomy, guilds and confraternities, frames, and the conservation and restoration of paintings and sculpture. This is a work for everyone who loves art, whether actively engaged in the subject professionally or as one of the countless amateurs visting sites and cities, galleries, and exhibitions, churches, libraries, country houses, and palaces in pursuit of beauty and cultural enrichment.
Helicon, editor. “Renaissance Art.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NDgyMjYz?aid=96765.
“Baroque, in Art and Architecture.” The Columbia Encyclopedia, by Paul Lagasse and Columbia University, 8th ed., Columbia University Press, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NjMyMTIw?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Neoclassicism.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NTAwOTY2?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Romanticism.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NTA2MjYz?aid=96765.
“Realism.” Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Britannica Digital Learning, 2017. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NDQwNzY1?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Impressionism.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NTA3NTI1?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Post-Impressionism.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NDk0ODIz?aid=96765.
Paterson, Dominic. “ART NOUVEAU.” The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism, by Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Olga Taxidou, 1st ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NjYzMjU4?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Fauvism.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NTI3NjA5?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Expressionism.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NTI2NDc1?aid=96765.
West, Shearer, editor. “Cubism.” The Bloomsbury Guide to Art, 1st ed., Bloomsbury, 1996. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6MjcyODQx?aid=96765.
West, Shearer, editor. “Surrealism.” The Bloomsbury Guide to Art, 1st ed., Bloomsbury, 1996. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6OTMzNDE4?aid=96765.
West, Shearer, editor. “Abstract Expressionism.” The Bloomsbury Guide to Art, 1st ed., Bloomsbury, 1996. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6MTM2MDEyMA==?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Pop Art.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NDkzNTQ0?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Op Art.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NTA4OTEz?aid=96765.
West, Shearer, editor. “Arte Povera.” The Bloomsbury Guide to Art, 1st ed., Bloomsbury, 1996. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6OTI4NjY5?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Minimalism.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NDkzODc4?aid=96765.
Helicon, editor. “Conceptual Art.” The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide, Helicon, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NDgyMzY3?aid=96765.
“Contemporary Art.” The Columbia Encyclopedia, by Paul Lagasse and Columbia University, 8th ed., Columbia University Press, 2018. Credo Reference, https://search.credoreference.com/articles/Qm9va0FydGljbGU6NjI0Nzky?aid=96765.
Open Access Resources
For the full playlist series, visit CrashCourse, Art History