Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893. Oil on canvas, 49" × 35½".

Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937) was an African American artist. He was the first African American painter to gain international acclaim.  Blacks had long been stereotyped as entertainers in American culture, and the image of a black man playing the banjo appears throughout American art of the late 19th century.  Tanner works against this familiar stereotype by producing a sensitive reinterpretation. Instead of a generalization the painting portrays a specific moment of human interaction.  Tanner makes it obvious that there are real people being conveyed, not types.

Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, courtyard and façade.  Francesco Borromini, byname of Francesco Castelli (25 September 1599 – 3 August 1667) was an architect from Ticino^[1] who, with his contemporaries, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, was a leading figure in the emergence of Roman Baroquearchitecture.

The Pietà (1498–1499) is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti, housed in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. The statue was commissioned for the French cardinal Jean de Billheres, who was a representative in Rome. The sculpture, in Carrara marble, was made for the cardinal's funeral monument, but was moved to its current location, the first chapel on the right as one enters the basilica, in the 18th century. It is the only piece Michelangelo ever signed 

70-80 AD: The Colosseum, or the Coliseum, originally the Flavian Amphitheatre (Latin: Amphitheatrum Flavium, Italian Anfiteatro Flavio orColosseo), is an elliptical amphitheatre in the centre of the city of Rome, Italy, the largest ever built in the Roman Empire. It is considered one of the greatest works of Roman architecture and Roman engineering.  Capable of seating 50,000 spectators

Sandro Botticelli The Birth of Venus, 1486. Uffizi, Florence

The Triumph of Death (c. 1562), Museo del Prado, Madrid

Pieter Bruegel (Brueghel) the Elder (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈpitəɾ ˈbɾøːɣəl]; c. 1525 – 9 September 1569) was a Flemish Renaissancepainter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting). 

Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930), Art Institute of Chicago. 

     American scene painting refers to a naturalist style of painting and other works of art of the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States. American scene painting is also known as Regionalism.  

     After World War I many American artists rejected the modern trends emanating from the Armory Show and European influences such as those from the School of Paris. Instead they chose to adopt academic realism in depicting American urban and rural scenes.

     Much of American scene painting conveys a sense of nationalism and romanticism in depictions of everyday American life. During the 1930s, these artists documented and depicted American cities, small towns, and rural landscapes; some did so as a way to return to a simpler time away from industrialization whereas others sought to make a political statement and lent their art to revolutionary and radical causes. Representative artists include Thomas Hart Benton, John Rogers Cox, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry. 

Robert Henri, Snow in New York, 1902,National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods.

Dionysus, god of wine, in his boat,
. Dionysus reclines on a ship which sprouts grapevines and is surrounded by dolphins, c. 530 BC, Munich State Collection of Antiquities. Black figure pottery.

Pottery styles associated with the later part of the Archaic age are black-figure pottery, which originated in Corinth during the 7th century BC, and its successor, the red-figure style, developed by the Andokides painter in about 530 BC.

Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma, 1603, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Painted during Rubens's first trip to Spain in 1603

Rubens travelled to Spain on a diplomatic mission in 1603, delivering gifts from the Gonzagas to the court ofPhilip III. While there, he studied the extensive collections of Raphael and Titian that had been collected byPhilip II.^[7] He also painted an equestrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma during his stay (Prado, Madrid) that demonstrates the influence of works like Titian's Charles V at Mühlberg 

This papyrus was found in the tomb of the scribe Hunefer in Thebes. It dates from the 19th Dynasty, about 1285 BC. It can be seen in the British Museum.

What does the papyrus show?

This is a famous scene from the Book of the Dead, chapter 125. It shows the soul of the deceased (Hunefer) being led to judgment by Anubis. A court of gods sits above. Hunefer's heart is weighed on the scales on the left, against the feather of truth (maat) on the right.

Last judgment from west tympanum -Autun St. Lazare Tympanon The West facade of St. Lazare contains the tympanum (1130–1135), within the portico which is ranked amongst the masterpieces of Romanesque sculpture in France. a tympanum (plural, tympana) is the semi-circular or triangular decorative wall surface over an entrance, bounded by a lintel and arch

Linear perspective is based on the idea that all lines will converge on a common point on the horizon called the vanishing point. You have observed linear perspective when you notice that the lines on the highway appear to meet at a point in the distance. Artists use linear perspective to create a focal point for a picture.

"Justinian and Attendants," c. 547, San Vitale, Ravenna.  Some of the world's greatest art, in the form of mosaics, was created during the fifth and sixth centuries in Turkish Byzantium and its Italian capital, Ravenna.  Used reflective glass cubes with surfaces left uneven so work sparkled, glowing glass in wide range of colors, found on walls and ceilings - especially church dome and apse, subjects were religious, like Christ as shepherd, large cubes in stylized designs, background was abstract: sky-blue, then gold.

Early Renaissance: Primavera, also known as Allegory of Spring, is a tempera panel painting by Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. Painted ca. 1482, the painting is described in Culture & Values (2009) as "[o]ne of the most popular paintings in Western art".

The Last Supper covers an end wall of the dining hall at the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. The theme was a traditional one for refectories, although the room was not a refectory at the time that Leonardo painted it. The main church building had only recently been completed (in 1498), but was remodeled by Bramante, hired by Ludovico Sforza to build a Sforza family mausoleum.

Italian Renaissance, Titian: The Father of Modern Painting's "Assumption of the Virgin" - a large oil painting  executed in 1516-1518.  It is located on the high altar in the Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, being the largest altarpiece in the city.

Florence (Pazzi Chapel & the Cloister) On another level, perhaps the greater mark on history left by the Pazzi is the Pazzi Chapel built under the direction of Filippo Brunelleschi in a discreet cloister of the Franciscan church, Santa Croce. After some early agreements, the chapel was begun in 1442. It is one of the incunabula of Renaissance architecture: severely restrained, made of pietra serena and white plaster, and unrelieved by color.

The Northern Renaissance: Portrait of a Man in a Turban (actually a chaperon), possibly a self-portrait, 1433.  Van Eyck was credited with inventing oil painting.  Man in a Red Turban was the earliest known painting in which the sitter looked at the spectator.  

The Garden of Earthly Delights is the modern title given to a triptych painted by theEarly Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch.  

  Dating from between 1490 and 1510, when Bosch was about 40 or 50 years old,  it is his best-known and most ambitious, complete work.  It reveals the artist at the height of his powers; in no other painting does he achieve such complexity of meaning or such vivid imagery. 

  The triptych is painted in oil on oakand is formed from a square middle panel flanked by two other oak rectangular wings that close over the center as shutters. The outer wings, when folded, show a grisaille painting of the earth during the biblical narrative of Creation. The three scenes of the inner triptych are probably (but not necessarily) intended to be read chronologically from left to right.

A comparison of Tintoretto's final The Last Supper (1594) provides an instructive demonstration of how artistic styles evolved over the course of the Renaissance - while Leonardo's is all classical repose, Tintoretto's canvas is crowded and dynamic, with obvious Mannerist traits like a plunging diagonal perspective, making the picture seem off-balance.  He used light for emotional effect, from the darkest black to the incandescent light emanating from Christ's head and sketchy, chalk-white angels.  

Caravaggio - The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600). Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. The beam of light, which enters the picture from the direction of a real window, expresses in the blink of an eye the conversion of St Matthew, the hinge on which his destiny will turn, with no flying angels, parting clouds or other artifacts.  

     The most common element throughout was a sensitivity to and absolute mastery of light to achieve maximum emotional impact.  Carravagio, a master of light, advocated "direct painting" from nature - often, it seemed, directly from the seamy slums.  

One of Caravaggio's most successful followers of his "i tenebrasi" style was Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), the first woman painter to be widely known and appreciated.   Gentileschi devoted herself to painting women who wreak violence against men who have wronged them.

Façade of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1665-67). Borromini: (Dynamic Architecture) his trademark style was alternating convex and concave surfaces to create the illusion of movement.  Was cited as doing for architecture "what Caravaggio did for painting"  

The Battle of Issus, Pompeii, c. 80 BC, The Battle of Issus occurred in southern Anatolia, in November 333 BC. The invading troops, led by the young Alexanderof Macedonia, defeated the army personally led by Darius III of Achaemenid Persia in the second great battle for primacy in Asia.  The mosaics of Pompeii used opaque marble cubes, had smooth, flat finish, limited colors due to the use of natural stones, were typically found on floors of private homes, had secular subjects like battles, games, used minute pieces for realistic detail, had background represented in the landscape.

The School of Athens, or Scuola di Atene in Italian, is one of the most famous frescoes by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. It was painted between 1510 and 1511 as a part of Raphael's commission to decorate with frescoes the rooms now known as the Stanze di Raffaello, in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The Stanza della Segnatura was the first of the rooms to be decorated, and The School of Athens the second painting to be finished there, after La Disputa, on the opposite wall. The picture has long been seen as "Raphael's masterpiece and the perfect embodiment of the classical spirit of the High Renaissance."

The Rococo Basilica at Ottobeuren (Bavaria): architectural spaces flow together and swarm with life Rococo - also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century artistic movement and style, which developed in the early part of the 18th century in Paris, France as a reaction against the grandeur, symmetry and strict regulations of the Baroque, especially that of the Palace of Versailles.  

Rococo artists opted for a more jocular, florid and graceful approach to Baroque art and architecture. in such a way it was ornate and made strong usage of creamy, pastel-like colours, asymmetrical designs, curves and gold. Unlike the more politically focused Baroque, the Rococo had more playful and often witty artistic themes. With regards to interior decoration, Rococo rooms were designed as total works of art with elegant and ornate furniture, small sculptures, ornamental mirrors, and tapestry complementing architecture, reliefs, and wall paintings

John Steuart Curry, Tragic Prelude, 1938-1940, Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansas.  Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working classactivities as heroic.  The movement is a style of painting in which the scenes depicted typically convey a message of social or political protest edged with satire.

The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Liber chronicarum byHartmann Schedel.  Dance of Death, is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. 

The Pantheon (an adjective meaning "to every god") is a building in Rome, Italy, commissioned as a temple to all the gods of Ancient Rome, and rebuilt by Emperor Hadrian in about 126 AD.  ^{The building is circular with a portico of large granite Corinthian columns (eight in the first rank and two groups of four behind) under a pediment. A rectangular vestibule links the porch to the rotunda, which is under a coffered, concrete dome, with a central opening (oculus) to the sky. Almost two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon's dome is still the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome. The height to the oculus and the diameter of the interior circle are the same}

Salome is an oil painting by Italian late Renaissance painter Titian, dated to around 1515 and now held at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome.  Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western art.

Late Archaic Period - 490 BCE Terracotta Clay Vessel/Amphora: "young man singing and playing the kithara" This work is a masterpiece of Greek vase-painting because it brings together many features of Athenian culture in an artistic expression of the highest quality. The shape itself is central to the effect. 

This 7' 7" x 7' 9" fresco can be seen in the Arena Chapel in Padua.  It was created by Giotto and dated 1305-1306.  The work depicts the Lamentation or Mourning of Christ. Giotto has opened a door into a new style that will be know as Early Renaissance painting.  He creates a world that is voluminous, 3-dimensional, and symbolic.  The figures in the foreground are clearly human.  His understanding and appreciation of human form is expressed through free flowing clothing that reveal volumesque bodies.  There is a clear distinction between the human forms and the angelic and saintly counterparts.  

The Isenheim Altarpiece is an altarpiece painted by the German artist Matthias Grünewald in 1506-1515. It is on display at the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar, Alsace, now in France.  By far his greatest, as well as his largest work, it was painted for the Monastery of St. Anthony in Isenheim near Colmar, which specialized in hospital work. The Antonine monks of the monastery were noted for their care of plague sufferers as well as their treatment of skin diseases, such as ergotism. The image of the crucified Christ is pitted with plague-type sores, showing patients that Jesus understood and shared their afflictions.

 Giorgione The Tempest (c. 1508)
High Renaissance - The Tempest has been called the first landscape in the history of Western painting. The subject of this painting is unclear, but its artistic mastery is apparent. The Tempest portrays a soldier and a breast-feeding woman on either side of a stream, amid a city's rubble and an incoming storm. 

Monticello

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz is a painting by El Greco, a painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. Widely considered among his finest works, it illustrates a popular local legend of his time. An exceptionally large painting, it is very clearly divided into two sections, heavenly above and terrestrial below, but it gives little impression of duality. The upper and lower sections are brought together compositionally.

Las Meninas (Spanish for The Maids of Honour) is a 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age, in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The work's complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analyzed works inWestern painting.

View of Delft is an oil painting by Johannes Vermeer. Painted ca. 1660-1661, the painting of the Dutch artist's hometown is among his most popular.^[1] Painted at a time when cityscapes were not commonplace, it is one of three known paintings ofDelft by Vermeer, along with The Little Street and the lost painting House Standing in Delft.^[2] The use of pointillism in the work suggests it postdates The Little Street.

1732-1753 Georgian Style Independence Hall is the centerpiece of Independence National Historical Park located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is known primarily as the location where both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were debated and adopted.

Navajo Weaving: A transitional blanket, woven circa 1880-1885. The thick handspun yarns and synthetic dyes are typical of pieces made during the transition from blanket weaving to rug weaving, when more weavings were sold to outsiders.

Historically, Plains Indian tribes preserved the passage of time through oral history, recalling important events to mark the year and passing those stories down through the generations. This winter count, a pictographic calendar created by the Lakota that records these stories from 1798-1904, offers a one hundred and six year glimpse of their history.Each image on a winter count represents an important event that happened one specific winter, and this transcription is held by a keeper who is responsible for its content and remembers the associated stories. Each winter count varies slightly, often combining events that were shared tribally and events that may have happened in the specific village of origin. . 

The Death of General Wolfe is a well-known 1770 painting by Anglo-American artist Benjamin West depicting the death of British General James Wolfe during the 1759 Battle of Quebec of the Seven Years' War. It is an oil on canvas of the Enlightenment period.  

^{Benjamin West, was an Anglo-American painter of historical scenes around and after the time of the American War of Independence.}

The pottery produced in the Mimbres region, often finely painted bowls, is distinct in style and is decorated with geometric designs and figurative paintings of animals, people and cultural icons in black paint on a white background. The elaborate decoration indicates that these people enjoyed a rich ceremonial life. Early Mimbres Black-on-white pottery, called Boldface Black-on-White (now called Mimbres Style I), is primarily characterized by bold geometric designs, although there are also a few early examples of human and animal figures. Over time, both geometric and figurative designs became increasingly sophisticated and diverse.

1890, The Faithful Colt by William Michael Harnett -an Irish-American painter known for his trompe l'oeil still lifes of ordinary objects.

Frederic Sackrider Remington was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U. S. Cavalry.  Arizona cow-boy (1901 lithograph)

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent, 1893, - John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury.  During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. Sargent was referred to as "the Van Dyck of our times.

The Sullivan Center, formerly known as the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building or Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Store,^[4] is a commercial building in Chicago, Illinois. It was designed by Louis Sullivan, it is remarkable for its steel-framed structure, which allowed a dramatic increase in window area created by bay-wide windows, which in turn allowed for the greatest amount of daylight into the building interiors.

1841, The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowa by George Catlin - an American painter, author and traveler who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West.

1836 - View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, commonly known as The Oxbow, is a seminal landscape painting by Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School. The painting depicts a Romantic panorama of the Connecticut River Valley just after a thunderstorm. It has been interpreted as a confrontation between wilderness and civilization.