Art History Facts | KidsKonnect

Nobody knows specifically when the first people starting producing art, but it is believed that art has been created as far back as 100,000 years ago
The earliest art work comes from Africa in the form of stone carvings. There are many examples of cave paintings and carvings from both Africa and Europe, dating back to 32,000 BC.
Somewhere around 9,000 BC, people began to change from being traveling nomads to settling down in villages. At this time the art began to evolve into larger pieces. In West Asia and Egypt the first stone and clay statues were created and this is also when artists began to create decorated pottery.
Around 3,000 BC, people learned how to work with metals and began to create small pieces of art from bronze – often small statuettes. This was the era when people in Greece and India began to create art and in Egypt sculptors were creating large, lifelike stone statues which were painted realistically and were life-size.
The Dark Age around 1,100 BC in East Asia and the Mediterranean Sea led to most people being unable to afford to buy art. Artists stopped creating their pieces for several hundred years.
After the Dark Age, it was in Greece that the Archaic and Classical sculpture was started, along with the black-figure and red-figure vase paintings.
The Etruscans in Italy started to create large stone and clay statues as well as painted pottery that they also created.

Things changed when Alexander the Great conquered West Asia in 325 BC and people were able to travel throughout the empire. Ideas about art were exchanged and this lead to the first Greek stone statues reaching India with Indian sculptors following Greek methods to carve large statues of Buddha.
The rise of the Roman Empire spread Greek art to the west as well with artist in North Africa and north Europe creating pieces of art in the Roman style.
This Roman time is when blown glass became an art form. It was invented by Phoenician artists and sold to both England and China.
In 200 AD, artists began to experiment and moved away from realistic painting and sculptures to a more abstract form. Statues with larger eyes for example, was to indicate that the subject had a strong soul.
There was a second Dark Age after the fall of Rome in 450 AD and again, not much art was produced for several hundred years.
In China during this time they began to make new kinds of painting using a new invention that would revolutionize the world of art: paper!
In Medieval times, art was evolving and showing the world differently. Christianity became a big theme, as did Islam.

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