History of painting

Painting is one of the seven fine arts and one of the oldest forms of expression dating back to prehistory, some fifty thousand years ago. There is evidence of cave paintings in the Altamira cave in Spain and the Lascaux cave in France, among others. For the first human beings, painting was an expression of symbolic thought that emerged long before the invention of writing.

The term rock is derived from the Latin rupestris and means rock. Humans painted drawings of animals or stencils of their hands on the walls of caves. They used their fingers, flattened stones or feathers as tools to capture the dyes they obtained from nature, such as the red of iron oxide or the blood of an animal and the black of manganese oxide or charcoal.

Five thousand years ago, Egyptian painting showed an evolution in its techniques and designs, although they maintained conceptual rather than realistic images. They used to paint figures of mythological beings and scenes of daily life, such as hunting and agriculture, on the walls of the tombs of the pharaohs.

Roman painting was of great influence for the Greeks, both for the walls decorated with mural painting using the fresco technique, and for the painting on tableware and ceramics. The Greeks stood out for their advances in painting techniques on ceramics.

Before the Spanish invasion, the painting of the native American peoples represented religious situations, their different deities and questions of astrology, as can be seen in the Aztec, Teotihuacan or Mayan cultures. Starting in 1492 with the arrival of Columbus to America, the European art also exerted its influence on art and painting.

With the connection of the old and the new world, new artistic movements, most of which emerged in Europe, spread throughout the world. For example, modernism from 1900, Gothic painting from 1400, Cubism from 1910, Expressionism from 1914 and Dadaism from 1916, among others.

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