Art · Chapter 1
How to look
A painting is an object in a room. A building is an object you walk through. The maker, the date, and the later reading stay in the sentence.
The pictures in this chapter are the ones a public museum can still put on a wall, or a city can still let you enter. Where a canvas is under copyright, the page names it and shows a different work.
The oldest pictures a public can visit
The Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave in southern France was found in 1994. The French Ministry of Culture places its paintings in the Aurignacian, on the order of 36,000 years ago, and keeps the cave itself closed. A replica, the Caverne du Pont-d’Arc, is the room a visitor can walk. The animals on that wall are a find. A story about who taught the painters is a later reading, and if it is being argued it belongs with History.
What a museum label is doing
A label gives a name, a date, and a collection. The Louvre’s Mona Lisa is Leonardo’s painting, worked on from about 1503 into his last years. Raphael’s School of Athens is a fresco in the Vatican, painted about 1509 to 1511, on the wall of a pope’s library room. The painted hall is full of arches. The room around the fresco is also a work. This chapter keeps the picture and the building as two objects.
What this chapter will not reproduce
In much of the world a painting stays in copyright until seventy years after the painter’s death. Picasso died in 1973. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica are named later, with the museums that hold them, and they are not shown here. The older works on these pages are in the public domain. Photographs of buildings are used under the licence written on each file.
Sources
- French Ministry of Culture. “Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave.” archeologie.culture.gouv.fr. Accessed 28 October 2026.
- Musée du Louvre. “Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, known as the Mona Lisa.” collections.louvre.fr. Accessed 28 October 2026.
- Vatican Museums. “The School of Athens, Stanza della Segnatura.” www.museivaticani.va. Accessed 28 October 2026.