Visual Arts Library — Index
The history and practice of the visual arts — painting, sculpture, architecture-adjacent form, the graphic and time-based media — across the world’s traditions, from Paleolithic caves to the global contemporary. Sister to
Music/in the Arts group; complementsHumanities/Philosophy/aesthetics(the philosophy of art) and draws onHumanities/History/for context.
- Status: Tier 1 complete (12 notes) + Tier 2 specialty (2 deep dives) + Tier 3 catalogs (2), authored 2026-06-03.
- Conventions: named artists, works, movements, and dates throughout; works in italic; no emojis. Architecture, film, literature, and the performing arts now have their own libraries (see the Arts group).
Tier 1 — The Western tradition, chronologically
| Topic | File | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Prehistoric & ancient art | prehistoric-and-ancient-art | cave art, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aegean |
| Classical art of Greece & Rome | classical-art-of-greece-and-rome | the invention of naturalism; the orders; Roman portraiture & architecture |
| Medieval & Byzantine art | medieval-and-byzantine-art | Early Christian, Byzantine icons, Romanesque, Gothic |
| Renaissance art | renaissance-art | perspective, the High Renaissance, the Northern Renaissance, Mannerism |
| Baroque, Rococo & 18th-century art | baroque-rococo-and-eighteenth-century-art | Caravaggio to Bernini, the Dutch Golden Age, Rococo, early Neoclassicism |
| Nineteenth-century art | nineteenth-century-art | Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism |
| Modern art, 1900–1945 | modern-art-1900-1945 | Fauvism, Cubism, abstraction, Dada, Surrealism, the Bauhaus |
| Postwar & contemporary art | postwar-and-contemporary-art | Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual, postmodern, the global contemporary |
Tier 1 — World traditions
| Topic | File | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Asian art | asian-art | Chinese, Japanese, Korean, South & Southeast Asian, Himalayan |
| Islamic, African & Indigenous art | islamic-african-and-indigenous-art | Islamic, African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American traditions |
Tier 1 — Media and theory
| Topic | File | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Media, techniques & materials | media-techniques-and-materials | drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, new media, conservation |
| Art theory, criticism & the art world | art-theory-criticism-and-the-art-world | art history’s methods, theories of art, criticism, the museum & the market |
Tier 2 — Specialty deep dives
| Topic | File | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Color theory & the materials of painting | color-theory-and-the-materials-of-painting-deep | the physics & perception of color, color theory, the structure of paint, a history of pigments, the painting media, aging & conservation |
| Iconography & the methods of art history | iconography-and-the-methods-of-art-history-deep | formal analysis (Wölfflin), iconography/iconology (Panofsky, Warburg), connoisseurship, the social history of art, the New Art History, technical & digital methods |
Tier 3 — Catalogs
- Tier 3 index
- artists-catalog — ~200 major visual artists by era & tradition
- art-movements-and-isms-catalog — ~90 movements, styles & -isms
Adjacent libraries
- aesthetics — the philosophy of art and beauty
- Music — the sister art (the period parallels: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern)
- History — the historical context of each period
- ReligiousStudies — the religious function of much pre-modern art
- cultural-anthropology — the ritual/cultural context of world and Indigenous art
- culture-media-and-socialization — taste, cultural capital, the production of culture