The traditions and spirit of a particular period in painting has usually been reflected in many of its other visual arts. The ideas and aspirations of ancient cultures, of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical periods of Western art and, more recently, of the 19th-century Art Nouveau and Secessionist movements were emulated in much of the architecture, interior design, furniture, fabrics, ceramics, dress design, and handicrafts, as well as in the fine arts, of their times. Following the Industrial Revolution, with the redundancy of hand-craftmanship and the absence of direct communication between the fine craftsman and society, idealistic efforts to unite the arts and crafts in service to the community were made by William Morris in Victorian England and by the Bauhaus in 20th-century Germany. Although their aims were not fully realized, their influences, like those of the short-lived de Stijl and Constructivist movements, have been colossal, particularly in architectural, furniture, and typographic design.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were prodigous painters, sculptors, and architects. Although no artists have since excelled in so wide a range of creative forms, leading 20th-century painters conceptualized their thoughts in many other mediums. In graphic design, for example, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Raoul Dufy printed posters and illustrated books; André Derain, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney designed for the theatre; Joan Miró, Georges Braque, and Chagall worked in ceramics; Braque and Salvador Dalí designed jewelry; and Dalí, Hans Richter, and Andy Warhol made movies. Many of these, with other modern painters, have also been sculptors and printmakers and have designed for fabrics, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass, while there are few mediums of the visual arts that Pablo Picasso did not at some point work in and revitalize.

Painters have been stimulated by the visuals, techniques, and design of other visual mediums. One of the earliest of these influences was possibly from the theatre, where the ancient Greeks are thought to have been the first to use the illusions of optical perspective. The discovery or reappraisal of design techniques and imagery in the art-forms and processes of other cultures has been a wonderful stimulus to the development of more contemporary schools of Western painting, whether or not their traditional significance have been understood. The influence of Japanese woodcut prints on Synthetism and the Nabis, for example, and of African sculpture on Cubism, and the German Expressionists helping to create visual vocabularies and syntax with which to express new inspirations and ideas. The development of photography and film introduced painters to new aspects of nature, while eventually inspiring others to abandon representational painting altogether. Painters of everyday life, such as Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, and Bonnard, applied the design innovations of camera cutoffs, close-ups, and unconventional viewpoints in order to give the spectator the sensation of sharing an intimate picture space with the figures and forms in the painting.

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