About Cultured Eye
A study app for Western art history – with glimpses of Japan and China – made for reading, looking and practising.
Recognising art is something you learn by looking at a great deal of it. That is why there is Explore, where new works keep appearing for as long as you scroll, and Practise, where what you already know comes back at ever longer intervals.
All images come from Wikimedia Commons and from museums that have released their collections freely, and all may be used, including commercially. Images for the works in the collection are chosen in advance via Wikipedia, and those for the gallery via Wikidata and the museums' open APIs. The creator, licence and source are given with every image.
Works by artists and designers who are alive or died less than 71 years ago are protected by copyright and are therefore not shown. Instead, the work’s colours are shown as a colour field – a reminder to go and see the original in person.
The content is general knowledge of the kind found in encyclopaedias and survey books. Cultured Eye makes no claim to original research or unique interpretations.
The texts, translations and questions have been produced with the help of AI (large language models) and summarise established art history. They have not been reviewed by a subject expert; dates for early works are often approximate, and the boundaries between periods are simplifications.
What is distinctive is the way the material is presented: timelines and country-by-country tracks, maps, a wealth of images from open collections, drawings and interactive illustrations that explain the concepts, and side-by-side comparisons. Everything is built around learning through quizzes and repetition – exercises that come back less and less often the better you know them.
Found a mistake? Report it and it will be corrected where needed. The same link is at the bottom of every period, work and artist page.
The app is available in Swedish, English, French, Italian and Spanish. All text is kept in language files separate from the code, so that more languages can be added. Names of artists, museums and places are proper names and are not translated.
Your progress in Practise and your lists are stored in your browser's local storage (localStorage) and are not sent to us. Images are fetched as files from Wikimedia Commons and the museums' image servers; the details about them are prepared in advance, so no searches are made there. Visitor statistics are collected only if you have agreed to it – more on the Cookies and visitor statistics page.