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Western art is the art of Europe, and individuals parts of the world that have come to follow mostly European cultural traditions such as the Americas.

Written histories of Western art often start with the art of the Ancient Middle East, Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Aegean civilizations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC. Similar with these important cultures, art of one form or another existed all over Europe, wherever there were people, leaving signs such as statues, decorated artifacts and huge standing stones. However a consistent pattern of artistic development within Europe becomes clear only with the art of Ancient Greece, approved and transformed by Rome and carried, with the Empire, across much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

The power of the art of the Classical period waxed and waned throughout the next two thousand years, seeming to slip into a remote memory in the Medieval period, to re-emerge in the Renaissance, suffer a term of what some early art historians viewed as "decay" during the Baroque period, to reappear in a refined form in Neo-Classicism and to be re-born in Post-Modernism.

Western art is arranged into a number of stylistic periods, which, historically, overlap each other as dissimilar styles flourished in different areas. Broadly the periods are, Classical, Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Modern. Each of these is further subdivided.