Painting, the execution of forms and shapes on a surface by means of pigment, has been     1    practiced by humans for some 20,000 years. Together with other activities     2    ritualistic in origin but have come to be designated as artistic (such as music or dance), painting was one of the earliest ways in which man     3    to express his own personality and his     4    understanding of an existence beyond the material world.     5    music and dance, however, examples of early forms of painting have survived to the present day. The modern eye can derive aesthetic as well as antiquarian satisfaction     6    the 15,000-year-old cave murals of Lascaux—some examples     7    to the considerable powers of draftsmanship of these early artists. And painting, like other arts, exhibits universal qualities that     8    for viewers of all nations and civilizations to understand and appreciate.
    The major     9    examples of early painting anywhere in the world are found in Western Europe and the former Soviet Union. But some 5,000 years ago, the areas in which important paintings were executed     10    to the eastern Mediterranean Sea and neighboring regions.     11    , Western shared a European cultural tradition—the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin and, later, the countries of the New World.
    Western painting is in general distinguished by its concentration on the representation of the human     12    , whether in the heroic context of antiquity or the religious context of the early Christian and medieval world. The Renaissance     13    this traitor through a     14    examination of the natural world and an investigation of balance, harmony, and perspective in the visible world, linking painting     15    the developing sciences of anatomy and optics. The first real     16    from figurative painting came with the growth of landscape painting in the 17th and 18th centuries. The landscape and figurative traditions developed together in the 19th century in an atmosphere that was increasingly     17    "painterly" qualities of the     18    of light and color and the expressive qualities of paint handling. In the 20th century these interests     19    to the development of a third major tradition in Western painting, abstract painting, which sought to     20    and express the true nature of paint and painting through action and form.