~17000 BCE — Cave paintings of Lascaux
Description: Lascaux Cave was closed to visitors in 1963 — the breath of thousands of tourists had begun to damage the pigments.
Painting, architecture, sculpture, music, literature and theatre — from the earliest monuments to the present. Each of the 200 events opens on click. Pick a field below and its lane lights up; the others recede. Zoom in (the + / − buttons, or Ctrl + mouse wheel) and event names appear on the lanes.
Description: Lascaux Cave was closed to visitors in 1963 — the breath of thousands of tourists had begun to damage the pigments.
Description: Many Egyptian murals kept their vivid color thanks to the dry climate of the tombs.
Description: The pyramid remained the tallest structure in the world for nearly 3,800 years.
Description: The purpose of Stonehenge is still debated — from an observatory to a site of funeral rites.
Description: The figurine takes its name from the Austrian town near which it was found in 1908.
Description: The Nefertiti bust is held in Berlin and remains the subject of a dispute over its return to Egypt.
Description: The flutes found so far were made from bird and mammoth bone and can still produce sound.
Description: The Epic of Gilgamesh was rediscovered by scholars only in the 19th century, after millennia of oblivion.
Description: The red-figure technique was the first to let painters brush in details over the background rather than scratch them in.
Description: The Fayum portraits are a rare surviving example of ancient panel painting.
Description: The Parthenon was built with almost no straight lines — every element is slightly curved to create the optical illusion of perfect straightness.
Description: The Pantheon's dome remained the largest in the world for nearly 1,300 years, until the Renaissance.
Description: Kouroi depicted idealized youths, always with one foot slightly advanced.
Description: The statue of Zeus at Olympia was counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but it has not survived.
Description: The Winged Victory of Samothrace has neither head nor arms, yet that has not kept it from becoming one of the most recognizable ancient sculptures.
Description: The Venus de Milo had already lost its arms before it was discovered in 1820.
Description: The Terracotta Army numbers more than 8,000 warriors, each with unique facial features.
Description: The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius survived because medieval Christians mistook it for an image of Emperor Constantine.
Description: According to legend, Pythagoras derived musical intervals by listening to hammers of different weights ringing in a smithy.
Description: The authorship of Homer's poems is still debated — scholars remain unsure whether he existed as a single author.
Description: The early Indian epics were passed down orally for centuries before they were written down.
Description: The Aeneid was commissioned by Emperor Augustus and was meant to glorify the founding of Rome.
Description: Thespis, according to tradition, was the first actor to step onto the stage apart from the chorus.
Description: Aeschylus's trilogy is the only ancient tragic trilogy to survive complete.
Description: According to legend, Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays, but only seven survive complete.
Description: Aristophanes's comedies are the only fully surviving examples of ancient Greek Old Comedy.
Description: The Theatre of Pompey seated, by various estimates, as many as 10,000–20,000 spectators at once.
Description: In the Orthodox tradition an icon is regarded not simply as an image, but as a “window” into the spiritual world.
Description: Giotto was the first in Western painting to give figures volume and natural emotion.
Description: Hagia Sophia remained the world's largest Christian church for nearly a thousand years.
Description: The mosque in Córdoba brings together more than 850 columns, some of them taken from earlier Roman buildings.
Description: Building Notre-Dame took nearly two centuries — several generations of craftsmen succeeded one another.
Description: The Buddha statues of Bamiyan were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
Description: Romanesque sculptors often deliberately distorted figures' proportions for expressiveness rather than realism.
Description: The moai are carved from volcanic tuff and weigh up to several dozen tons each.
Description: Gregorian chant is performed unaccompanied and in unison.
Description: Before the staff was invented, melodies were passed on almost exclusively by memory.
Description: Hildegard of Bingen is one of the first women composers in the history of music known by name.
Description: The Tale of Genji was written by a court lady and is considered the world's first psychological novel.
Description: The Song of Roland describes a real battle, greatly embellished and recast as legend.
Description: Dante wrote the poem in Italian rather than Latin — an unusual choice for serious literature of the time.
Description: Liturgical drama was performed during the church service itself, acting out biblical stories.
Description: Mystery cycles could last several days in a row and were performed by the town's craft guilds.
Description: Before the discovery of perspective, painters simply made more important figures larger than the rest.
Description: Van Eyck's painting contains a tiny convex mirror in which the scene itself — and the painter — are reflected.
Description: Botticelli's Primavera is one of the first Renaissance paintings on a mythological rather than religious subject.
Description: The Florence cathedral stood for years without a dome — engineers did not know how to build one.
Description: Brunelleschi's dome was built without a single wooden support inside — the technique remained a mystery long after his death.
Description: The young Lorenzo Ghiberti won the competition, beating more experienced masters, including Brunelleschi.
Description: Chaucer was among the first to write serious literature in vernacular English.
Description: In Noh theatre actors traditionally perform in masks, and women's roles have historically been played by men.
Description: The exact identity of the woman in the portrait remains a matter of debate among art historians.
Description: Michelangelo regarded himself first and foremost as a sculptor and painted the chapel ceiling with almost no assistants.
Description: In Raphael's fresco, Plato and Aristotle are shown surrounded by dozens of recognizable philosophers and scholars.
Description: Bruegel's cycle of five surviving paintings depicts the changing seasons through peasant labor.
Description: Building St. Peter's Basilica stretched over more than a century and involved a whole succession of architects.
Description: The term “Palladianism” gave its name to an entire current in European and American country-house architecture.
Description: The Pietà is the only sculpture Michelangelo signed with his name.
Description: The statue of David was originally meant to stand high on the cathedral, but because of the work's beauty it was placed in the square at eye level.
Description: Rabelais's novel is packed with neologisms — many of the words he coined entered the French language.
Description: London's first public theatres were sited outside the city limits to avoid religious censorship.
Description: The term “tenebroso” comes from the Italian word for “dark.”
Description: The painting actually depicts a daytime scene, not night — the canvas, darkened by old varnish, was mistakenly named The Night Watch.
Description: Las Meninas shows the artist himself at work — a rare device for the period.
Description: Art historians think the “pearl” in Vermeer's painting is most likely not a real pearl at all.
Description: The Taj Mahal was built as a mausoleum in memory of the emperor's deceased wife.
Description: The sums spent on building Versailles were comparable to a share of France's annual budget at the time.
Description: Wren's cathedral was rebuilt after the previous one burned in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
Description: Bernini's sculpture captures the moment the nymph Daphne turns into a laurel tree before the viewer's eyes.
Description: Bernini's sculpture combines marble, bronze, and hidden overhead lighting to create the effect of a mystical vision.
Description: Peri's opera has not survived in full, but it is regarded as the first example of the opera genre itself.
Description: Monteverdi's opera is the oldest opera still regularly performed on stage.
Description: Bach dedicated the concertos to the Margrave of Brandenburg, who, according to legend, never appreciated the work in the composer's lifetime.
Description: Handel wrote the oratorio Messiah in just 24 days of uninterrupted work.
Description: Hamlet remains one of the most quoted plays in the history of the English language.
Description: Don Quixote is regarded by many scholars as the first modern novel in Western literature.
Description: Milton dictated the poem to assistants, already completely blind.
Description: The deserted-island novel was inspired by the true story of a sailor who lived alone for several years.
Description: Swift disguised sharp political satire as a fantastic voyage in order to avoid censorship.
Description: The Globe burned to the ground during a performance in 1613 — a spark from a stage cannon struck the thatched roof.
Description: In kabuki, as in Noh, all roles, including women's, are traditionally played by male actors.
Description: Corneille's play provoked a literary quarrel so fierce that France convened an academic commission specifically to judge it.
Description: Tartuffe was temporarily banned by the Catholic Church in France immediately after its premiere.
Description: Chinese opera combines singing, acrobatics, martial arts, and symbolic face makeup.
Description: David's painting was made shortly before the French Revolution and symbolically anticipated its ideals.
Description: Goya's series combines fantastic imagery with sharp social satire of the society of his day.
Description: The Capitol was rebuilt and expanded several times as the number of U.S. states grew.
Description: Rococo sculpture favored light, playful subjects, in contrast to the solemn Baroque of the previous era.
Description: Canova's sculpture depicts the moment of Cupid's kiss awakening Psyche from a deathlike sleep.
Description: Mozart's opera was based on a play that was then banned in Austria as politically provocative.
Description: Goethe's novel sparked a wave of copycat suicides among readers — a rare case of literature's direct influence on life.
Description: The first opera houses made opera accessible not only to a court audience but to city-dwellers as well.
Description: La Scala was built on the site of a previous theatre destroyed by fire.
Description: The painting's subject is based on a real shipwreck that became a scandal in French society.
Description: The painting shows an allegorical figure of Liberty leading real participants in the July Revolution.
Description: The painting caused a scandal mainly because of a nude woman in the company of clothed men at a picnic.
Description: The rebuilding of Westminster followed a fire that destroyed the previous Houses of Parliament in 1834.
Description: The Crystal Palace was built in just a few months and later burned to the ground in 1936.
Description: By the time he finished the symphony, Beethoven had already almost completely lost his hearing.
Description: Schubert wrote more than 600 songs in his short thirty-year life.
Description: Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique was among the first works in music to tell a coherent story through orchestration.
Description: La traviata failed at its premiere, but later became one of the most performed operas in the world.
Description: Wagner's opera is considered a forerunner of the musical language of the 20th century because of its unusually prolonged delayed harmonic resolution.
Description: Austen published her novels anonymously — the cover named only an unknown author.
Description: Mary Shelley began writing the novel at 18, as part of a literary contest with friends.
Description: Dumas's novel is based in part on a real court case from the early 19th century.
Description: Flaubert was tried for the novel's immorality soon after publication — the court acquitted him.
Description: Tolstoy rewrote the novel several times — the draft manuscripts run to thousands of pages of revisions.
Description: Dostoevsky wrote the novel under pressure from gambling debts, publishing it in installments in a magazine.
Description: The Mariinsky Theatre changed its name several times along with Russia's shifting political eras.
Description: The name “Impressionism” was coined by a mocking critic who dismissed the painting as “just an impression.”
Description: Van Gogh painted the picture while under treatment in a psychiatric hospital in the south of France.
Description: Construction of the Sagrada Família continues to this day — more than 140 years after work began.
Description: Frame construction made it possible for the first time for buildings to rise without extremely thick load-bearing walls.
Description: Many Parisians at first considered the Eiffel Tower ugly and demanded it be torn down after the exhibition.
Description: The Thinker was originally conceived as part of a far larger composition, The Gates of Hell.
Description: Rodin depicted not heroes but townspeople condemned to death who had volunteered to save their city from a siege.
Description: The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to the United States and was originally conceived as a symbol of the abolition of slavery.
Description: Edison's phonograph was the first device in history that could both record and play back sound.
Description: Joplin called ragtime not merely entertainment but serious composed music.
Description: The Palais Garnier in Paris became the model for the novel The Phantom of the Opera.
Description: The Meiningen company was the first to introduce a unified directorial concept for a production instead of free actor improvisation.
Description: The Moscow Art Theatre became one of the first theatres to systematically apply Stanislavski's system of actor training.
Description: The premiere of The Cherry Orchard took place on Chekhov's birthday; he died only a few months later.
Description: The painting's title refers to a brothel on a street where Picasso himself grew up.
Description: Malevich regarded the painting not simply as an image but as the “zero point” in the history of painting.
Description: Duchamp signed the urinal with a pseudonym and presented it as a finished work of art — the “readymade” genre.
Description: Grant Wood's painting depicts not a married couple but a father and his unmarried daughter.
Description: Picasso created Guernica in response to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.
Description: The Bauhaus lasted only 14 years, yet it defined the look of 20th-century architecture and design worldwide.
Description: The Dessau building became a manifesto of a style that united functionality with an industrial aesthetic.
Description: The building remained the world's tallest for more than 40 years — a record span for 20th-century skyscrapers.
Description: The house is built literally over a waterfall — the water itself flows under part of the structure.
Description: Le Corbusier's principles underpinned standardized housing estates around the world, including Soviet mass housing.
Description: Brancusi's The Kiss reduces the figures of the lovers to an almost geometric minimum of forms.
Description: Boccioni's sculpture appeared on the Italian 20-euro-cent coin.
Description: The Mount Rushmore memorial depicts the faces of four U.S. presidents, carved directly into the rock.
Description: Moore deliberately left holes through his sculptures, playing with form and space.
Description: Christ the Redeemer withstands several lightning strikes a year on average, thanks to a lightning rod in the crown.
Description: Worker and Kolkhoz Woman was created for the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair.
Description: Giacometti deliberately reduced the volume of his figures, seeking a sense of human fragility and solitude.
Description: At the Paris premiere the audience hissed and shouted so loudly that the musicians could barely hear one another.
Description: Early jazz records were cut on fragile shellac discs that played for only a few minutes.
Description: The Harlem Renaissance joined jazz to a flowering of African American literature and art at the time.
Description: Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert is regarded as the moment jazz was officially recognized as a serious concert art.
Description: The publication of Ulysses was temporarily banned in the United States and Britain for obscenity.
Description: Before his death Kafka asked a friend to burn all his manuscripts — the friend disobeyed and published them.
Description: Work on Proust's cycle occupied most of the author's life — the total length exceeds three thousand pages.
Description: Remarque was stripped of German citizenship by the Nazis soon after this anti-war novel appeared.
Description: Steinbeck's novel caused such a public stir that it was temporarily banned in some American states.
Description: The premiere of Stravinsky's ballet nearly caused a brawl in the auditorium — so unfamiliar were the music and choreography.
Description: Meyerhold developed a system of biomechanics that trained the actor's body almost like that of an athlete or circus performer.
Description: Artaud never lived to see a full production based on his manifesto.
Description: Paintings of this movement were often made by “dripping” — splattering paint directly onto a canvas on the floor.
Description: Warhol painted soup cans precisely because he had eaten that soup almost every day for twenty years.
Description: The movement brought figuration and emotion back into painting after decades of abstraction and Minimalism.
Description: The Guggenheim building was one of Wright's last major works, completed after his death.
Description: The “sails” of the roof proved so complex that construction took 14 years instead of the planned four.
Description: The Centre Pompidou deliberately placed all its engineering services on the outside of the building, leaving the interior halls completely free.
Description: The museum in Bilbao is widely credited with sparking the economic revival of the entire city — an effect later called the “Bilbao effect.”
Description: The towers remained the world's tallest buildings until 2004.
Description: Oldenburg made giant sculptures of ordinary objects — from hamburgers to clothespins.
Description: Spiral Jetty appears and then vanishes completely underwater depending on the lake's level.
Description: Hirst's work is officially titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
Description: Chicago's Cloud Gate was nicknamed “the Bean” for its distinctive shape, which reflects the cityscape.
Description: The LP held far more music than the earlier fragile 78-rpm discs.
Description: The song became one of the first tracks officially classified by the industry as “rock and roll.”
Description: The Beatles' appearance on American network television drew one of the largest TV audiences of its time.
Description: The Woodstock festival drew about 400,000 spectators, far more than the number of tickets sold.
Description: Hip-hop was born at parties in Bronx housing projects, around DJ equipment.
Description: The Walkman made listening to music truly mobile and private for the first time.
Description: CDs were billed as a format that sounded “perfect the first time and forever,” with no wear from playback.
Description: Nirvana's album unexpectedly overtook Michael Jackson in the charts, marking alternative rock's arrival in the mainstream.
Description: Napster was shut down by a court order only two years after launch, but it had already irreversibly changed the entire industry.
Description: In the novel Orwell coined the terms “Newspeak” and “Big Brother,” which later entered everyday language in many countries.
Description: Hemingway received the Pulitzer Prize for the novella, and a year later the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Description: Tolkien created invented languages with full grammars for his world even before writing the plot itself.
Description: Harper Lee's novel long remained her only published book — a second appeared only half a century later.
Description: The term “magical realism” came to be associated above all with this novel by García Márquez.
Description: The book about the young wizard was rejected by several publishers before it went to press.
Description: The Avignon Festival remains one of the world's largest theatre festivals, drawing hundreds of companies every year.
Description: Brecht's “alienation effect” was meant to make the spectator think rather than simply empathize with what was happening.
Description: Brook's experimental season brought together actors of different styles in search of a new theatrical language.
Description: Until censorship was abolished, every play in Britain had to be approved by a court official — the Lord Chamberlain.
Description: A Chorus Line became one of the longest-running Broadway musicals of its time.
Description: The Phantom of the Opera remains one of the highest-grossing theatrical works in the history of Broadway and the West End.
Description: Banksy remains anonymous despite the worldwide fame of his work.
Description: The sale of Beeple's collage became one of the largest auction deals ever for a work by a living artist.
Description: The Burj Khalifa is so tall that residents of the lower and upper floors can watch the sunset several minutes apart.
Description: Many of the medieval wooden structures of the spire burned in a matter of hours, despite the cathedral's nearly eight centuries of history.
Description: Modern technology makes it possible to build tall wooden buildings once thought impossible under fire-safety codes.
Description: 3D printing for the first time allowed artists to create complex forms that could not have been carved or cast by hand.
Description: The iPod held “a thousand songs in your pocket” — that was how Apple advertised it.
Description: Spotify was originally launched as a legal way to compete with pirate services such as Napster.
Description: The question of copyright in AI music remains legally unresolved in almost every country.
Description: E-books allowed authors to publish directly, bypassing traditional publishers.
Description: The ability to detect AI-written text remains a serious technical problem even for specialized software.
Description: Audiences at Sleep No More move freely through the building after the actors, choosing which storyline to follow.
Description: The pandemic forced many of the world's theatres to close their doors temporarily or for good.
Description: Hybrid formats allowed theatres to keep an audience that could not attend in person.