Impressionism took hold of the French art scene during the late 19th century. The name for the movement is thought to have been inspired by a Claude Monet painting titled "Impression: Sunrise," first exhibited at a small art show in Paris. Although the Impressionism movement included artists from outside France, the French became the most well known. Claude Monet, along with Pierre Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne and others, used color and the effect of light on natural settings to give an overall impression of their subjects. This perspective revolutionized the world's perspective on art.
Big ideas are sometimes conceptional, sometimes they are just big. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni's awe-inspiring 14-foot sculpture of the Biblical David was created to give the people of Florence courage in the face of adversity. When Michelangelo began building the piece in 1501, the city was surrounded by threatening forces. By reminding the people of David's victory over the powerful foe, Goliath, Michelangelo hoped to remind Florence of a victory of innovation over numbers.
Another revelatory piece of art came to Michelangelo as a commission. Pope Julius II della Rovere commissioned Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel in 1508. The work opened to the public with a large mass in October of 1512. A crew of hundreds worked alongside Michelangelo to complete the massive undertaking. Michelangelo used distorted perspectives to create visual effects along the chapel's paneling.
Leonardo Da Vinci, the painter known for the Mona Lisa, was a one-man revolutionary in the art world. The Mona Lisa, on display at the Lourve in Paris, has seduced audiences for centuries with her smile and direct gaze. But Da Vinci's scope reached beyond the world of painting. His notebooks are filled with sketches depicting ideas in science and philosophy that revealed a man ahead of his time.
Moving pictures, eventually shortened to be called movies, first appeared in the early 1900s. The advent of these moving pictures revolutionized the entertainment industry by providing easily accessible performances. Sound wasn't introduced into film until the 1930s. With the addition of sound came the era of the "Talkies," which quickly led to the Golden Age of Cinema in Hollywood. As of 2011, the film industry brings in millions of dollars with just one opening weekend of a major motion picture.
Before film and the great American musical, there was the Greek stage. The ancient Greeks revolutionized the performance arts. Contests held for playwrights brought names such as Euripides and Aristophanes to the forefront. The traditional arrangement of plot, character and style in the theater have their beginnings on the Greek stage. Thespian, a word for actor, is taken from the name Thespis, who is given credit as the first performer. Many of the terms used in theater have their origins in Greek theater, such as scene, act and orchestra.