About This Issue

7. Seven Defining Styles in Art History is a guided journey through nearly five centuries of painting, told through seven carefully chosen works. Rather than presenting a survey of icons, this issue focuses on how artistic thinking shifted from one era to the next, responding to changing ideas about faith, reason, pleasure, labor, and inner life.

The journey begins with Baroque, where drama and belief shape form and light. It moves into the Dutch Golden Age, grounding art in everyday experience and quiet observation. Rococo follows with elegance and cultivated ease, before Neoclassicism restores order, discipline, and moral clarity. Academicism refines technique and narrative polish, while Realism turns directly toward ordinary life and human experience. The issue closes with the Pre-Raphaelites, where symbolism and emotional intensity bring reflection and devotion back to the surface.

Seen together, these styles form a conversation across time. Not a timeline to memorize, but a sequence of ways humans have chosen to see themselves and their world.