How to Create an Art Timeline

Create a timeline, highlighting a certain period in art history.

The world of art dates back as far back as the dawn of civilized man, as evidenced by cave paintings. A helpful way to show and quickly summarize some of the highlights of the art world is to create a timeline. Timelines are images that consist of a single horizontal line, highlighting points in chronological order from left to right. Creating the timeline consists of researching and gathering data and then condensing it into a compressed and easily understandable form.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Pencil
• Paper
• Ruler

1. Decide which era you're going to use for your timeline. Art historians have already broken down the history of art into periods time periods such as Baroque, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Modern and Postmodern, so this part should be fairly easy.

2. Research to find highlights from the period you've chosen. Pick the most influential artists, as well as the most influential pieces. Write it all down on a piece of paper.

3. Organize the information you've gathered into chronological order. Don't write it on the timeline yet; just organize it on a separate sheet. Find the earliest and latest years.

4. Draw a horizontal line, with vertical perpendicular lines intersecting it at even intervals. Determine what these intervals represent (for instance, if you want each vertical line to represent 10 years, then five vertical lines represent 50 years).

5. Label the first vertical line to represent the earliest year. Your first event should be near the first vertical line. Don't label each vertical line with a year; label only every five lines or so (keeping in mind the intervals you chose in Steps 3 and 4).

6. Add your events to the timeline in their respective places. Write a headline naming the artist, work of art or art movement. Label the year of the person or event in your description. For instance, if you are making a Renaissance timeline, add "Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa'" over the vertical line representing the year 1505.

7. Complete the rest of the timeline until all of your events are on the timeline. For instance, on a timeline for the modern period, write "Surrealism Movement" over the years 1920-1930, noting that the movement originated in Europe. Place "Pop Art Movement" over the 1950s and 1960s line, making a note that Andy Warhol helped spearhead this period.

References

• Do History: How to Make a Timeline

Resources

• Metropolitan Museum of Art: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History