After placing the art you are viewing on a timeline, the next step is to build up a sense of time and place that is specific to the artwork and artist.

• Did the artists have friends or contemporaries that may have influenced the style of the work?
• Did the artist have a teache...

The idea that art is about progress is appealing to historians because it gives a simple linear-narrative framework. But this view tends to be exclusive in that it views Western art as the main story of art history without considering Islamic art, Turkish art, Japanese art, or West Africa's art.

The way we interact and understand art is dependent on how the narrative of art history has been produced.

For example, art flourished during the Renaissance. One of the main sources about artists of this time comes from the book 'Lives of the Artists', written by Italian ...