The shock of the new

The Sedge Warbler

In his latest book, Nick Trend unveils the greatest painting breakthroughs in the history of Western civilisation

Art history can be a dry affair – a chronological wade through medieval religious convention, Renaissance portraits, classical precedents and mythological mysteries.

So I have tried to inject a bit of life into the subject by taking a different approach – tracing specific moments when new themes, techniques and ideas first appeared in Western painting, and then charting what happened next.

When did the first artist break away from hundreds of years of tradition and ask a sitter to smile for his portrait? It might seem like an arbitrary question, but the answer – a picture of a young Italian gentleman – paved the way for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

And what about the first visual joke? Appropriately, my nomination for this was made just before the first smile. It’s a trompe-l’oeil fly, painted on the frame of a portrait of a Carthusian monk. It may serve as a reminder of human mortality; it’s also an amusing demonstration of the artist’s skill. And it kicked off a copycat craze – a meme, you could say – among artists all over Europe.

Then there is Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. It has been famous ever since it was painted in 1485. But the reason for its initial fame – or notoriety, perhaps – has been mostly forgotten: this was the first erotic nude to be painted since antiquity.

We sometimes forget, too, the importance of William Hogarth’s innovations. His Marriage A-la-mode, in the National Gallery, is comic in intent. It is also, in dramatising the break-up of a marriage, another first and a brilliant insight into human behaviour. Finally, my selection of 30 firsts stretches right into the 20th century and includes the first abstract painting. This turns out to be not by Kandinsky, Mondrian or Malevich, but by the

Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint, who made a series of monumental paintings of strange, floating forms in 1907. For decades, she was given almost no credit for her achievement but – and this is another first – Tate Modern is currently hosting a major exhibition of her work.

Nick Trend’s Art Firsts: The Story of Art in 30 Pioneering Works is out on 15th June

First marital breakdown: in The Tête à Tête, from Marriage A-lamode (1743), William Hogarth captures the alienation between husband and wife in a way that had never been done before