Art History

Throughout history, royal families have carefully crafted their images, using artists and photographers to portray them in a majestic and iconic light. Sometimes these images had serious consequences—whether they were the ones intended or not. Here are the stories of some of the ...read more

For much of their courtship, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s romance spanned an ocean. Although they are from different countries and radically different backgrounds—one a British royal, the other an American actress—modern travel and technology made their trans-Atlantic romance ...read more

Artists throughout history have found inspiration in their surroundings, from Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s Edo-era woodblock studies of Mt. Fuji to French post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin’s Technicolor explorations of Tahiti. But specific structures have also served as ...read more

Tattoos are more common in the workplace than ever before, but they can still be an occupational hazard. Particularly when your profession happens to be spy. Spycraft often involves moving between legal and criminal worlds—and few things are as risky as being discovered while ...read more

It’s impossible to know how many masterpieces have gone missing over the course of time, whether they were stolen, incorrectly thought destroyed or simply lost. The eight works on this list, all estimated to be worth millions of dollars, popped up in some surprising ...read more

The Nazca Lines are a collection of giant geoglyphs—designs or motifs etched into the ground—located in the Peruvian coastal plain about 250 miles (400 kilometers) south of Lima, Peru. Created by the ancient Nazca culture in South America, and depicting various plants, animals, ...read more

A painting that went for $60 in 1958 sold for a record $450 million at a Christie’s auction in November 2017, the highest price ever paid for a painting. That’s because the piece—known as Salvator Mundi, or “Savior of the World”—was identified as a work by Leonardo da Vinci in ...read more

In 2011 a newly rediscovered work by Leonardo da Vinci surprised the art world. It was a painting known as Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World), which showed Jesus gesturing in blessing with his right hand while holding a solid crystal orb in his left. The Salvator Mundi motif, ...read more

It’s usually very hard to figure out the diseases historical figures died from. Case in point: it took over 150 years for researchers to figure out that composer Frédéric Chopin died of pericarditis—a rare complication of tuberculosis that causes swelling around the heart—and ...read more

Surrealism is an artistic movement that has had a lasting impact on painting, sculpture, literature, photography and film. Surrealists—inspired by Sigmund Freud’s theories of dreams and the unconscious—believed insanity was the breaking of the chains of logic, and they ...read more

The New Deal was one of President Roosevelt’s efforts to end the Great Depression. Art projects were a major part of this series of federal relief programs, like the Public Works of Art Project, the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture and the Treasury Relief Art Project. ...read more

Art Nouveau was an art and design movement that grew out of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th Century. Art Nouveau highlighted curvaceous lines, often inspired by plants and flowers, as well as geometric patterns. Art Deco was a sprawling design sensibility that ...read more

In August 2004, Christos Tsirogiannis got a message that would change his life. Would he be interested in accompanying the Athens police on a raid? It might not seem like a job for an archaeologist, but police told him they might need his expertise once they got there. He agreed, ...read more

Modernism in the arts refers to the rejection of the Victorian era’s traditions and the exploration of industrial-age, real-life issues, and combines a rejection of the past with experimentation, sometimes for political purposes. Stretching from the late 19th century to the ...read more

Bauhaus was an influential art and design movement that began in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. The movement encouraged teachers and students to pursue their crafts together in design studios and workshops. The school moved to Dessau in 1925 and then to Berlin in 1932, after which ...read more

Impressionism was a radical art movement that began in the late 1800s, centered primarily around Parisian painters. Impressionists rebelled against classical subject matter and embraced modernity, desiring to create works that reflected the world in which they lived. Uniting ...read more

Cubism is an artistic movement, created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which employs geometric shapes in depictions of human and other forms. Over time, the geometric touches grew so intense that they sometimes overtook the represented forms, creating a more pure level of ...read more

The theft of the Mona Lisa has been called the “art heist of the century,” but the caper itself was fairly rudimentary. On the evening of Sunday, August 20, 1911, a small, mustachioed man entered the Louvre museum in Paris and made his way to the Salon Carré, where the Da Vinci ...read more