Appreciating art is as easy as making a trip to your local museum where you can compare notes and make your own judgment about whether a work is any good or not. Art pieces recognized as great works today were produced by the up-and-coming artists of yesteryear, so it pays to keep an eye on today’s future classics.

The history of art is immense; the earliest cave paintings pre-date writing by almost 27,000 years! If you're interested in art history, the first thing you should do is take a look at the timeline table in this Cheat Sheet, which briefly outlines the artists, traits, works, and events that make up major art periods and how art has evolved to the present day.

If you are familiar with any Renaissance, it is with the Italian High Renaissance. In this article, you encounter names of master artists that have become household words. Now you can put those names in context and find out how to appreciate the characteristics shared by the High Renaissance masters. Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo da Vinci's most Renaissance work is probably not his Mona Lisa or Woman with an Ermine, in Krakow, Poland, or even the Annunciation in the Uffizi.

Installation art is difficult to describe. In principal, it means taking a large interior (the exterior can be part of an installation, too) and loading it with disparate items that evoke complex and multiple associations and thoughts, longings, and moods. It's a huge three-dimensional painting, sculpture, poem, and prose work.

Impressionism began to take shape in the 1860s on the canvases of Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. But the actual birth of Impressionism was probably the summer of 1869, when Monet and Renoir painted views of a swimming resort at La Grenouillère on the Seine.That summer, they learned to catch the transitory moods of nature with quick, suggestive brushstrokes.

The bright colors and shocking contrasts of Paul Gauguin's paintings have amazed and perplexed artists and art lovers for over a century, and the story behind Gauguin's life and style is as interesting as his artwork.Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) tried to return to a primitive state through art and to find the proverbial "noble savage" or natural person.

Many art historians will tell you that Romanticism slips through your fingers when you try to define it. That's partly because Romantic artists didn't have one style like the Impressionists or Expressionists. The movement was about intense personal expression, so artists could focus on whatever turned them on.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known more simply as Caravaggio (1571–1610), was the greatest and most influential painter of the Baroque style. He was also a quick-tempered Bohemian who was often jailed for brawling and was forced to flee from the law and his enemies, escaping to Naples, Malta, and Sicily at various times.