Historical Styles
Named for the eras that produced them, these are largely architectural and interior vocabularies, and most were dug up by later centuries and given a second life.
Dictionary entry
- Art Deco 1920s–1930s / Style
Stages urban luxury with repeating geometry and a metallic sheen.
- Art Nouveau 1890s–1910s / Style
Joins letters, figures and ornament into one flowing, plant-like line.
- Gothic 12th–16th century / Style
Summons mystery, awe and permanence through verticality and dark ornament. What is described here is the medieval body of work; the nineteenth-century movement that dug it up stands separately as Gothic Revival.
- Palladianism 1550s– / 17th–18th century revival / Style
Palladio distilled proportion, the temple front and strict symmetry from Roman antiquity into a formula for the villa. His Four Books carried it to Britain and America, where it became the archetypal correct face of public architecture.
- Baroque 1600–1750 / Style
A total art that draws the viewer in with ovals, curved surfaces, dramatic light and an excess of ornament. Architecture, sculpture, painting and city planning were handled as one staging, turning power and faith into spectacle.
- Rococo 1730s–1770s / Style
Turned Baroque grandeur toward interior intimacy: shell-like curves, pale color and asymmetrical ornament composing a light-footed social space. One of the first styles in which decoration broke free of architecture to take the lead.
- Beaux-Arts 1830s–1920s / Style
The academic synthesis of the classical taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Grand axes, sculptural ornament and a hierarchy of formality were laid over the new technologies of iron and glass, giving the modern city its public face in stations, museums and banks.
- Sukiya Style 16th century– / Style
The light, informal residential style born of tea-ceremony aesthetics: slender posts, bark-edged timber, earthen walls and shoji light that let material nature and empty space become the quality of the room. Katsura became modernism's pilgrimage site.
- Renaissance 14th–16th century / Style
A movement that rediscovered ancient proportion and the human body and fixed three dimensions on a flat surface through linear perspective. Mathematics became the common language of painting and architecture, and the norms of the next five hundred years, symmetry, the classical orders and the golden ratio, were established here.
- Neoclassicism 1760s–1830s / Style
A movement that turned back to ancient simplicity, prompted by the excavations at Pompeii and reacting against the decorative excess of Rococo. Contours are hard, color is held down, and the subjects preach civic virtue. States of the revolutionary period chose this style as their own face.
- Gothic Revival 1740s–1900s / Style
A movement that deliberately chose the pointed arch and the verticality of the Middle Ages again, in objection to industrialization and to classicism. It was not simple nostalgia. It created the idea that choosing a style is an argument about morality and national character.
- Ancient Egyptian Art c. 3000–30 BCE / Style
Ancient Egyptian art rendered kingship, divinity and the afterlife as a lasting order through hierarchical scale, composite-view figures, horizontal registers and highly repeatable poses.
- Classical Greek Art c. 480–323 BCE / Style
Classical Greek art ordered observed bodies into ideal proportion and balance, using contrapposto, calm expression and controlled movement to present citizens, gods and heroes as harmonious norms.
- Roman Art c. 509 BCE–476 CE / Style
Roman art absorbed Greek, Etruscan and provincial forms while joining individualized portraiture, continuous historical relief, architecture and wall painting to ancestry, civic life and imperial power.
- Byzantine Art c. 330–1453 / Style
Byzantine art separated sacred presence from everyday space through frontality, hierarchical scale, gold grounds, non-naturalistic light and repeatable icon types across churches, mosaics and panels.
- Romanesque c. 1000–1150 / Style
Romanesque art joined pilgrimage and monastic culture to thick walls, round arches, barrel vaults and lucid masses, integrating elongated apocalyptic figures into church portals and capitals.
- Mannerism c. 1520–1600 / Style
Mannerism mastered High Renaissance proportion, perspective and balance, then deliberately unsettled them through elongated bodies, complex twists, compressed depth and cool unnatural color.
- Deco-Luxe early–late 1980s / Style
An 1980s revival that reconnects Art Deco and Streamline Moderne with wealth, finance, hotels, and nocturnal consumption. It is darker and glossier than its source period, using metal and mirrors to stage success itself.
- Decoplex early 1990s– / Style
A third-wave Deco revival mixing Golden Age Hollywood, early aviation, and WPA mural memory into 1990s entertainment architecture and commercial graphics. It is brighter, more dimensional, and more narrative than Deco-Luxe.
- Gay Nineties Revival late 1960s–late 1970s / Style
A late-1960s and 1970s revival of 1890s shops, rooms, and lettering as warm popular nostalgia. It is warmer than historical Victorian design, gathering brass, medium-dark wood, ferns, faux Tiffany glass, and old-fashioned lettering around food and entertainment.
- Renaissance Revival early–late 1990s / Style
A 1990s revival in which Renaissance fairs, Shakespeare editions, fantasy films, runway styling, and formalwear restaged Renaissance, Elizabethan, medieval, and fairy-tale references with deliberate anachronism. It creates a rich past that present-day visitors can enter rather than reconstructing history faithfully.
- Egyptian Revival late 18th–19th century / Style
A revival style in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the United States that transferred ancient Egyptian architecture and ornament to modern monuments, cemeteries, theatres and furniture. Obelisks, pylon-shaped entrances, papyrus and lotus capitals, and winged sun disks were organized into massive symmetrical compositions to project permanence, exoticism and the authority of discovery.
- Richardsonian Romanesque 1870s–1890s / Style
A late-nineteenth-century American architectural style in which H. H. Richardson recast medieval Romanesque round arches as rough masonry, deep openings, asymmetrical towers and low-spreading masses. Rather than surface decoration, stone weight, shadow depth and broad arches grouping entrances gave churches, libraries, courthouses and stations their public force.
- Second Empire 1852–1880s / Style
A nineteenth-century style originating in the opulent public architecture of France's Second Empire and spreading to civic buildings, hotels and houses in Europe and the United States. A mansard roof enclosed a useful upper story, while dormers, a central pavilion, bracketed cornices and quoins turned that added floor into urban prestige.