History of Art

Art began long before writing and long before art history classrooms named it. It started as a way to communicate, mark territory, tell stories of hunts and rituals, and imagine what lies beyond the visible world. The earliest marks we can call art were made on cave walls and portable objects, using charcoal, ochre, and bone—creating a visual conversation across generations.

Prehistoric marks: The Chauvet-Pont d'Arc, Lascaux, and Altamira in Europe showcase vivid animals and human forms drawn with charcoal and mineral pigments. In Africa’s Blombos Cave, ochre engravings hint at symbolic thinking tens of thousands of years earlier. These works reveal a shared impulse to map experience, tell stories, and commune with the unseen through marks that endure beyond a moment.

Beyond walls, portable art—sculptures and figurines—emerged as a form of memory and identity. The famed Venus figurines, dating to roughly 25,000–28,000 BCE, show how humans sought to capture fertility, form, and power in portable objects. Early designers also experimented with materials, shaping bone, stone, and clay, then adding pigment to create a sense of surface and life.

Across civilizations, painting and drawing diversified with culture. Egyptian tomb paintings used mineral pigments on plaster; Greek and Roman frescoes and encaustic works showed new surface possibilities. East Asia refined ink brushwork on paper and silk, balancing line and mood. Manuscripts, murals, and sculpture linked art to religion, history, and daily life in a continual dialogue.

Hence, art began as a human need to communicate and assign meaning—then evolved with tools, trade, travel, and technology, expanding from cave walls to temples, palaces, and eventually classrooms and galleries. The question of where art started is less a single origin than a global conversation about who we are and what we want others to know about us. This conversation still shapes how we live.