The chart is an interactive lineage map. Romanticism sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.

For Romanticism (c. 1780 – 1850), it traces one movement that shaped it, a well-established link: Neoclassicism; it runs alongside two parallel movements, a mix of well-established and looser, indirect links: Academic art and Exoticism; it fans out to seven movements it went on to influence, all well-established links: Abstract art, the Barbizon school, the Hudson River School, Neo-romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Realism and Symbolism.