Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture are marked by their renewal of classical forms, motifs and subjects. In the 15th century Leon Battista Alberti was important in theorising many of the ideas for painting that came to a fully realised product with Raphael's School of Athens during the High Renaissance. The themes continued largely unbroken into the 17th century, when artists such as Nicolas Poussin and Charles Le Brun were representative of the more rigid Classicism. Like Italian classicising ideas in the 15th and 16th centuries, it spread through Europe in the mid to late 17th century.

Later classical styles in painting and sculpture from the mid-18th and 19th centuries are generally referred to as Neoclassicism.