Intro of Art History Terms

Trompe l'oeil

A form of illusionistic painting that aims to deceive viewers into believing that they are seeing real objects rather than a representation of those objects.

Classical

A type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events

Nonrepresentational

Art without reference to anything outside itself -- without representation. Also called nonobjective -- without recognizable objects.

Naturalism

The bought that lifelike descriptions of the visual appearance of the natural world

Patron

The person or group who commissions or finances a work of art

Still life

a painting of inanimate objects such as fruit or flowers taken out of their natural contexts

Canon

an established set of principles or code of laws, often religious in nature

Contextualism

the historical study of art as product of its broad cultural context

Iconography

the images and symbolic representations that are traditionally associated with a person or a subject

Abstract

to capture the essence of the object, not merely its appearance, by painting its organic rather than the way it actually looked