Visual Arts & Architecture

Art that gives form, color, line, and material varying degrees of independence from recognizable subjects.

A Chinese handscroll attributed to Zhang Zeduan depicting Northern Song urban life, and the subject of a long tradition of reinterpretation.

American Pop artist and filmmaker whose work explored consumer goods, celebrity, reproduction, and the boundaries between art and commerce.

Angkor Wat is a 12th-century Khmer temple complex in Cambodia, built for King Suryavarman II and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

American photographer and conservationist known for black-and-white landscapes, the Zone System, and advocacy for national parks.

Architecture is the art and practice of designing buildings and spaces, integrating practical requirements, structural systems, environmental conditions, and cultural expression.

Art encompasses creative practices and works through which people shape materials, actions, and symbols into expressive, aesthetic, or culturally meaningful forms.

Baroque was a European style of art, architecture and music, roughly 1600–1750, marked by drama, movement and emotional intensity.

Bauhaus was a German art and design school (1919–1933) whose modernist principles shaped architecture and design education worldwide.

Ceramics decorated with cobalt-blue designs painted under a transparent glaze, chiefly Chinese porcelain from Jingdezhen, widely traded from the Yuan dynasty onward.

Chinese calligraphy is an art based on writing Chinese characters, creating aesthetic expression through brushwork, character structure, and composition.

The traditions, techniques, subjects, and historical development of painting in China, especially brush painting in ink and color.

Claude Monet (1840–1926) was a French painter and a founder of Impressionism, known for outdoor landscapes, serial studies of light, and the late Water Lilies cycle at Giverny.

Flavian Amphitheatre in Rome, built AD 70s–80s, the largest Roman amphitheatre and a symbol of ancient Rome.

An early twentieth-century art movement that transformed representation through fragmented forms, overlapping viewpoints, and experiments with collage and construction.

Cursive script, or caoshu, is a Chinese calligraphic script characterized by conventionalized abbreviation, fluid brushwork, and expressive spatial composition.

Wrought-iron lattice tower in Paris, built 1887–1889 for the World's Fair and now a global symbol of France.

The Forbidden City is Beijing’s former Ming and Qing imperial palace, renowned for its architecture, court history, and museum collections.

Mexican painter (1907–1954) known for self-portraits that explore identity, the body, pain and death, blending Mexican folk traditions with Surrealism.

Guernica is a 1937 anti-war mural by Pablo Picasso, painted in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Gernika during the Spanish Civil War.

A 6th-century Byzantine cathedral in Istanbul, later an Ottoman mosque, a museum, and since 2020 an active mosque again; a landmark of dome engineering.

Impressionism was a 19th-century French painting movement that favored light, color, and fleeting modern scenes over academic subjects and finish.

Italian Renaissance painter, engineer, anatomist and inventor, known for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.

Linear perspective is a geometric method for representing three-dimensional space on a flat surface through projection from a fixed viewpoint.

The Louvre is France's national art museum and one of the world's largest and most-visited museums, housed in the former royal palace in Paris.

Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet whose works transformed European art.

Marble statue by Michelangelo (1501–1504), a Florentine Renaissance icon now housed in the Galleria dell'Accademia.

Modernism is a constellation of artistic movements that developed new forms of expression in response to the changing conditions of modern life, particularly from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century.

Leonardo da Vinci's early 16th-century oil portrait in the Louvre, and the most famous painting in the world.

The Nobel Prize Medal is a personalized gold award whose portraits, allegorical imagery, and inscriptions distinguish the Nobel prize categories.

Oil painting is a method in which pigments are bound with a drying oil, and it has been a leading technique for artistic painting in Europe and beyond for several centuries.

Spanish painter and sculptor (1881–1973) who co-founded Cubism and produced Guernica; one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

Painting is the practice of applying color to a surface to create images, expressive forms, or decorative compositions.

A fifth-century BCE temple of Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, renowned for its architecture, sculpture, and enduring cultural significance.

Photography is the practice of recording light to create images, serving artistic, documentary, scientific, commercial, and personal purposes.

Pop art is a mid-20th-century movement that drew imagery from advertising, comics, and consumer culture, first in Britain and then in the United States.

The Pyramids of Giza are a complex of Old Kingdom royal tombs built during the Fourth Dynasty for Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, including the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, and associated temples and cemeteries.

Chinese painter (1864–1957), self-taught former carpenter, famous for ink paintings of shrimp and small creatures, and one of the most celebrated artists of modern China.

Realism in the arts is a mid-19th-century movement, beginning in France, that depicted contemporary, unidealized life; the term also names a broader recurring tendency in art, literature, theatre, film and music.

A major style of Chinese-character writing, distinguished by clearly articulated strokes and balanced, self-contained characters.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) was a Dutch Golden Age painter, draughtsman and etcher whose portraits, biblical scenes and self-portraits defined 17th-century use of light and shadow.

European visual arts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, shaped by classical revival, naturalism, and changing systems of patronage.

A fluid style of Chinese character writing combining abbreviated strokes, structural flexibility, and relative legibility.

A Catholic basilica in Barcelona, renowned for Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, Christian symbolism, innovative engineering, and construction spanning generations.

Spanish artist whose precise dream imagery, experimental methods, and public persona helped define Surrealism.

Sculpture is three-dimensional art made through carving, modeling, casting, construction, or other processes, ranging from small objects to monuments and installations.

Michelangelo's fresco cycle (1508–1512) on the vault of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, centred on nine scenes from Genesis.

A copper statue of Libertas on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, a gift from France dedicated in 1886, designed by Bartholdi and engineered by Eiffel.

Surrealism is an avant-garde movement launched in Paris in 1924 that sought to fuse dream and waking life through automatism, chance, and the unconscious.

Taj Mahal is a white marble mausoleum in Agra, India, built by Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Edvard Munch's image of an anguished figure on a fjord bridge, first painted in 1893, a central work of Expressionism and one of the most recognised artworks in the world.

Vincent van Gogh's 1889 oil painting of a swirling night sky over a village, based on the view from his asylum window in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence; held by MoMA in New York.

Japanese woodblock prints and paintings of the Edo period, depicting urban pleasures, actors, beauties and landscapes; a commercial art that later shaped Western modern art.

An armless Hellenistic marble statue, likely of Aphrodite, found on Milos in 1820 and displayed at the Louvre since 1821; its authorship, original pose and identity remain debated.

Dutch painter (1853–1890) whose expressive, intensely colored works, made mostly in the last decade of his life, shaped modern art and remain among the most recognized in Western painting.

Wang Xizhi (303–361) was a Chinese official and calligrapher of the Eastern Jin dynasty, traditionally revered as the Sage of Calligraphy.

A painting medium using pigments in a water-soluble binder, and the artworks produced with it, especially on paper.

Tang-dynasty official and calligrapher whose influential regular and running scripts became enduring artistic models.

Japanese artist and writer known for Infinity Nets, polka-dot motifs, soft sculptures, and immersive mirror installations.