Arts & Culture
Painting, music, literature and architecture across the centuries.
Featured in Arts & Culture
Start with these, then follow the links inside each article wherever they lead.
Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait painting by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, it has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, [and] the most parodied work of art in the world." The painting's novel qualities include the subject's enigmatic expression, the monumentality of the composition, the subtle modelling of forms, and the atmospheric illusionism.
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and palaeontology.
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known mononymously as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. He was born in the Republic of Florence but was mostly active in Rome from his 30s onwards.
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer, conductor, and pianist. Regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music, he was mentored during the Classical period, and his musical style was a key driver of the transition to Romantic music, and the expansion of instrumental forms such as the symphony, the piano sonata and the string quartet.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a Classical composer and musician. He completed more than 800 works in his life, including outstanding examples of most of the genres of his time: symphonies, concertos, chamber music, opera and choral music, and is regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor.
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterised by visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.
Baroque
The Baroque is a Western style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished from the early 1600s until the 1750s. It followed Renaissance art and Mannerism and preceded the Rococo (in the past often referred to as "late Baroque") and Neoclassical styles.
Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture is an architectural style prevalent in Europe from the late 12th to the 16th century, during the High and Late Middle Ages, surviving into the 17th and 18th centuries in some areas. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture.
Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music.
Hip-hop
Hip-hop is a genre of popular music that emerged in the early 1970s alongside an associated subculture created by African-American and Afro-Caribbean communities in New York City. The musical style is a synthesis of a wide range of techniques, but rapping is frequent enough that it has become a defining characteristic.
Film
A film, movie, or motion picture is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, since the 1930s, synchronized with sound and sometimes feature other sensory stimuli. Films are produced by recording people and objects with cameras or by creating them using animation techniques and special effects.
Ballet
Ballet is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of dance with its own vocabulary.
Opera
Opera is a form of Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet.
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter and sculptor who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.
Frida Kahlo
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.
Homer
Homer was an ancient Greek poet who is traditionally credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer was highly revered in ancient Greek society and is considered one of the most influential authors in history.
The Starry Night
The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village.
Taj Mahal
The Taj Mahall]; lit. 'Crown of the Palace') is an ivory-white marble mausoleum on the right bank of the river Yamuna in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India. It was commissioned in 1631 by the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658), to house the tomb of his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal; it also houses the tomb of Shah Jahan himself.
Sistine Chapel ceiling
The Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted in fresco by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, is a cornerstone work of High Renaissance art. The Sistine Chapel is the large papal chapel built within the Vatican between 1477 and 1480 by Pope Sixtus IV, for whom the chapel is named.
Calligraphy
Calligraphy 'beautiful writing') is fine handwriting as a visual art. It involves the design and execution of lettering or characters using a pen, ink brush, or other writing instruments.
Photography
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing, and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication.
Kabuki
Kabuki is a classical form of Japanese theatre, mixing dramatic performance with traditional dance. Kabuki theatre is known for its heavily stylised performances, its glamorous, highly decorated costumes, and for the elaborate kumadori make-up worn by some of its performers.
Rembrandt
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, known mononymously as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of Western art.
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his prolific output across a variety of instruments and forms, including the orchestral Brandenburg Concertos; solo instrumental works such as the Cello Suites and Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schübler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and choral works such as the St.
Claude Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of Impressionism who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of Impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions of nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting.
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English writer known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment on the English landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security.
Leo Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoyɪvʲɪtɕ tɐlˈstoj] ; 9 September [O.S. 28 August] 1828, 20 November [O.S. 7 November] 1910), usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time.
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. The band comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form that originated among African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues has incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture.
Cubism
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement which began in Paris. It revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and sparked artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture.
Surrealism
Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality", or surreality.
Parthenon
The Parthenon is a former temple on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece, that was dedicated to the goddess Athena. Its decorative sculptures are considered some of the high points of classical Greek art, and the Parthenon is considered an enduring symbol of ancient Greece, Western civilisation, and democracy.
Novel
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the Italian: novella for 'new', 'news', or 'short story', itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning 'new'.
Animation
Animation is a filmmaking technique whereby pictures are created or manipulated and then played in sequence to create the illusion of moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film.
Guides in Arts & Culture
How to look at a painting
Composition, colour, light and context: a practical way to get more out of any picture in a gallery.
A short history of Western art
From cave paintings to conceptual art, the major movements and what each was reacting against.
How music works
Pitch, rhythm, harmony and form explained without jargon, with a look at how sound becomes music.
Architecture through the ages
Columns, arches, domes and steel: how building technology and belief shaped the world's great structures.
The story of the novel
How long prose fiction developed from ancient romances and The Tale of Genji to the modern bestseller.
The language of film
Shots, angles, editing and sound: the techniques filmmakers use to tell stories and how cinema began.