painting

painting Art of using one or more colours, generally mixed with a medium (such as oil or water) and applied to a surface with a brush, finger or other tool to create pictures. Paintings are among the earliest of historical records. Painting in early civilizations, such as Egypt, was largely a matter of filling in with colour areas outlined by drawing. Little Greek painting survives (apart from that on pottery). The Romans were greatly influenced by Greek art, as the fine fresco paintings at Pompeii and Herculaneum demonstrate. In the early Christian and Byzantine periods, traditions in mural painting and manuscript illumination were established that were to last throughout the Middle Ages. When the humanist ideals of the Renaissance took root in s Europe, the range of subjects and techniques available to the artist widened enormously. The period also saw the first use of oil paint on canvas, the beginnings of genre painting and pure portraiture. It was also the age of perspective and of a more natural approach to form and composition. To this creative legacy, the great painters of the Baroque period added an unrivalled bravura brushwork and drama of vision. North of the Alps, the Renaissance spread more gradually than in Italy. The 17th-century Dutch painters' choice of intimate, everyday subjects was the antithesis of the grand manner characteristic of the Italian masters. By the 18th century, British painters had become established in portraiture, animal, and landscape painting, although overshadowed by the great Venetian masters. The 19th century opened with the supremacy of neo-classicism challenged by the new Romanticism. Both schools were superseded, first by impressionism and then by a succession of new movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of these movements – impressionism, post-impressionism, symbolism, fauvism, cubism, Dada, and surrealism – originated in Paris. Germany was the cradle of expressionism and Russia contributed suprematism. In the latter half of the 20th century, the USA produced many original movements, such as abstract expressionism, pop art, and op art.