A cultural subject that has attracted my attention over the years has been the western geographic and temporal variability of upsurges in the visual arts, music and literature, especially the former two. I find it most interesting how there are specific periods of great flourishing as well as drought in these arts in each country. A similar variability is observed in the sciences.
Let me take painting and sculpture, first. Everything started, obviously, with Ancient Greek sculpture which, still unmatched, lasted for about two or three centuries after which Greece went dormant for over two millennia.
The visual arts revived within the religious Christian realm after the 11th century, or so, in particular in Italy, France and Spain, followed by the stunning outburst of the Italian Renaissance from the 14th to the 16th centuries, followed immediately by the spectacular Dutch/Flemish painting explosion from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Neither Italy nor the Low Countries produced any notable visual art thereafter, with the recent exception of the Italian Modigliani, who worked mainly in France.
There was a brilliant period of painting in Spain, mainly during the 17th century (e.g. Velásquez, Murillo, Zurbarán, etc.) but not until the early 19th century did Spain produce another major painter again, Goya, who was to be followed by a total dearth.
A brief period of painting brilliance occurred in Britain during the late 1700s and early 1800s (e.g., Reynolds, Turner, Gainsborough, etc.). Not much before or after.
Perhaps the most stunning outburst of the visual arts ensued in France principally throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries; there were too many famous painters and sculptors to attempt to enumerate them. Only the Italian Renaissance produced a comparable outburst.
The Germanic world had a period of brilliance during the 15th and 16th centuries (e.g., Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Holbein, Grünewald, etc.). Not much so thereafter, until the 20th century (e.g., Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Georg Grosz, Käthe Kolwitz).
As to music, Italy had a notable period with numerous composers of importance starting in the 16th century and continuing into the 18th (Palestrina, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Corelli, etc.) but starting in the early 19th century it went into remission, except for operatic music which I, for one, am not too fond of, with few exceptions. Rossini and Paganini were minor contributors. Not until the 20th century appears a significant Italian composer: Ottorino Respighi.
France’s numerous and brilliant musical contributions were, perhaps less temporary and more continuous. Starting in the 14th century with Guillaume de Machaut), Josquin des Prez in the 15th, through the 17th all the way to the 20th, from Couperin, Lully and Rameau, to the Impressionist greats, Debussy and Ravel, following Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Bizet in the 19th century. An absence of major French composers is to be noted during the second half of the 18th century, however.
Britain is, as in so many other ways, peculiar. The heyday of English composers was in the 1500s and 1600s: Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Jeremiah Clarke, Henry Purcell, etc. What followed is, in my opinion, a veritable musical desert that lasted several centuries. When finally there was a reawakening in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was music permeated by bucolic banality. To be fair, there was one composer worth listening to: Elgar. The rest can be safely ignored.
Spain had a musical Siglo de Oro with great religious music composers during the 1500s: Tomás Luis de Victoria, Cristóbal de Morales, Alonso Mudarra, etc. Then there was a protracted dry spell that lasted until the 19th century[1]. Thereafter we have a true flourishing with such luminaries as Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, Pablo de Sarasate, Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados, Manuel de Falla, Joaquín Turina, Federico Monpou, etc. Russia produced no composers worth mentioning before the 19th century, perhaps reflecting the state of culture of that country. Then, a veritable explosion ensued, perhaps beginning with Mikhail Glinka, we have a long and distinguished list which I have mentioned previously, including Borodin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, etc., followed later by Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Germany/Austria represents a special musical case. Starting in the Baroque period, essentially the 1500s, with Michael Praetorius, there was a nearly uninterrupted flow of great composers until the first half of the 20th century, perhaps until Richard Strauss. To name just the greatest of them: Bach, Händel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, etc.
Central Europe produced a series of brilliant composers, principally straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. Notable among them: Dvorak, Janáček, Kodály, Bartok, Martinu and Suck.
Scientific clusters of brilliance can also be identified through the ages. Again, the Greek/Alexandrian phenomenon is clearly the earliest of them and perhaps unsurpassed in history. A list of notable scientists of that period extending from about 500 BC to 200 AD would occupy several pages, ranging from Pythagoras to Ptolemy.
The subsequent hegemony of Christianity created a protracted dry spell. Science revived in the Moslem world during the 8th to 13th centuries, preserving and expanding on the Ancient Greece heritage. This period is often referred to as the Islamic Golden Age. There were several famous polymaths such as (Latinized names) Avicenna, Averroes, Alhacen, Alfraganus, and many others during that period. Thereafter, total dearth and religious obscurantism in the Moslem realm that persists to today.
Science then shifted its center of gravity to Italy for a short time following the Rennaisance (Galileo, Cardano, Tartaglia, Da Vinci, etc.) until the intellectual repression by the Catholic Church took hold for several centuries. Credit must be given to an exception: the notable Italian mathematician Fibonacci who lived in the 13th century. Northern Europe then prevailed. (Vesalius, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Huygens, van Leeuwenhoek, Newton, etc.).
France had a notable scientific boom starting in the 17th century and lasting well into the 19th starting perhaps with Descartes, Pascal and Fermat, and continuing throughout the Enlightenment with an unusual plethora of great mathematicians (Fourier, Laplace, d’Alembert, Cauchy, Maupertuis, Lagrange, and many others).
During the 1800s, science gradually gravitated towards Britain (Faraday, Maxwell, Rayleigh, Kelvin, etc.) and Germany (Gauss, Bessel, Fraunhofer, Hertz, etc), but increasingly became more distributed throughout the western world. The United Stated became a major player after the second half of the 19th century and has predominated ever since. The gradual globalization of science has now extended to the entire world.
[1] Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga has been nicknamed the Spanish Mozart, died at age 19 in 1826.
Pedro Lilienfeld 
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