Quiz game
Style Detective
Identify eras, artworks, and turning points from bundled images and clues, then get an immediate explanation.
ArtArc
The Story of Art
Explore, quiz, compare, and collect your way through 500,000 years of art — from a zigzag carved into a shell to pictures conjured from words.
12 chapters · 66 moments · offline interactive learning
Download on the App StoreOne unbroken arc
ArtArc is the everyday person’s guide to the story of art. A single, beautiful scrolling timeline begins half a million years ago with a zigzag carved on a shell, and ends with pictures conjured from words.
Twelve chapters. Sixty-six moments. Each one a story you can read in a minute, with native tools that help you test what you noticed, compare ideas across time, and keep track of what you have discovered.
More than a timeline
Built to explore
ArtArc now includes native, offline learning features designed for active discovery, not just reading.
Progress
Art Passport
Track the chapters and milestones you have explored, with local progress that stays on your device.
Guided looking
Compare Mode
Put works and ideas side by side to see what changed, what survived, and why the argument mattered.
Details
Image Hotspots
Tap into selected artworks for focused notes on symbols, techniques, composition, and context.
Along the way
The Ice Age
The First Galleries
Chauvet and Lascaux — and the 1880 scandal when experts refused to believe cave art was real.
Antiquity
Painters of Eternity
Egypt's painters of eternity, Greece's first signed artworks, Rome's painted illusions.
The Renaissance
The Great Inventions
Perspective, oil paint, and the first mass-media copy panic.
1839 Onwards
“Art's Most Mortal Enemy”
Photography arrives — and courts have to rule on whether a machine's picture can be art at all.
The Moderns
Named After an Insult
Impressionism, Van Gogh (who sold almost nothing), Duchamp's urinal.
The Machine Age
When Programs Painted
The 1965 plotter exhibitions, the program that painted for forty years, and the night two duelling neural networks changed image-making forever.
The Prompt Era
Pictures From Words
DeepDream's hallucinations, the $432,500 AI portrait, the astronaut riding a horse, and the state-fair prize that started a global argument.
A story you can feel
Era-themed colors
wash the screen as you travel through time
Native navigation
lets you jump between Timeline, Passport, Compare, and Detective
Tappable details
turn selected artworks into guided looking exercises
At home on iPhone and iPad, portrait or landscape.
No account. No ads. No tracking. The reference stays free.
The full timeline works offline — every chapter, your progress, images, and credits ship with the app. ArtArc Plus is an optional upgrade — a monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-time lifetime unlock — that adds unlimited Style Detective, every detail pack and comparison, and saveable wallpapers. Images come from public-domain, Creative Commons, and museum open-access collections, with license information included.