Art History Vocabulary

Treatise

A formal and systematic written discourse on some subject, generally longer and treating it in greater depth than an essay, and more concerned with investigating or exposing the principles of the subject. A how-to book.

Sack of Rome

1527, at the end of the High Renaissance. It marked a crucial imperial victory in the conflict between Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and the League of Cognac (1526-1529) — the alliance of France, Milan, Venice, Florence and the Papacy.

Tondo

A circular painting or relief sculpture.

Giorgio Vasari

(1511-1574) Was both a painter and an architect. Today, however, most people associate him primarily with his landmark book, "Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects," first published in 1550.

Counter-Reformation

(Also the Catholic Revival or Catholic Reformation) was the period of Catholic revival beginning with the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and ending at the close of the Thirty Years' War (1648), and was initiated in response to the Protestant Reformation.

alla prima

(In the first hit). Painting technique in which opaque pigments are laid on in one application of a loaded brush with rapid, sketch-like strokes; little or no blending of successive layers of paint. Delacroix used this technique.

Anamorphic image

A distorted image that must be viewed by some special means (such as a mirror) to be recognized.

Putto

A cherubic young boy.

Grand Manner

A grand and elevated style of painting popular in the Neoclassical period of the 18th century. An artist working in this manner looked to the ancients and to the Renaissance for inspiration; for portraits as well as history painting, the artist would adopt the poses, compositions, and attitudes of Renaissance and antique models.

Etching

A kind of engraving in which the design is incised in a layer of wax or varnish on a metal plate. The parts of the plate left exposed are then etched (slightly eaten away) by the acid in which the plate is immersed after incising.

Impasto

A layer of thickly applied pigment.

Approximate (Intuitive) Perspective

A method of giving the impression of recession by visual instinct, not by the use of an overall program or system.

Grisaille

A monochrome (one color) painting done mainly in neutral grays to stimulate sculpture.

Realism

A movement that emerged in mid-19th century France; artists represented the subject matter of everyday life (especially that which up until then had been considered inappropriate for depiction) in a realistic mode.

Daguerreotype

A photograph made by an early method on a plate of chemically treated metal; developed by Louis J. M. Daguerre.

Still life

A picture depicting an arrangement of inanimate objects.

Lithography

A printmaking technique in which the artist uses an oil-based crayon to draw directly on a stone plate and then wipes water onto the stone. When ink is rolled onto the plate, it adheres only to the drawing. This was the new social media of the time.

Pastoral

A scene depicting shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art and music that depicts such life in an idealized manner, typically for urban audiences.

Prix de Rome

A scholarship for arts students. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV.

Cycle

A series of paintings, frescoes, or tapestries depicting a single story or theme intended to be displayed together.

Genre

A style or category of art; also, a kind of painting that realistically depicts scenes from everyday life.

Rococo

A style, primarily of interior design, that appeared in France around 1700. These interiors featured lavish decoration, including small sculptures, ornamental mirrors, easel paintings, tapestries, reliefs, wall paintings, and elegant furniture. The term derived from the French word rocaille (pebble) and referred to the small stones and shells used to decorate grotto interiors.

Classical

A term referring to the art and architecture of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Any aspect of later art or architecture reminiscent of the rules, canons, and examples of the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Also, generally, any art aspiring to the qualities of restraint, balance, and rational order exemplified by the ancients.

Neoplatonism

A thought form rooted in the philosophy of Plato. Pagan philosophies (especially those of the Greek philosopher Plato) and classical myths are merged neatly with Christianity.

Theophany

A visible manifestation to humankind of God or a god. God appearance or manifestation = "mystical vision"

Omnivoyant

All-seeing

Polyptych

An altarpiece composed of more than three sections.

Illusionism

An appearance of reality in a work of art created by the use of certain pictorial mean such as perspective and foreshortening; the quality of having an illusionistic appearance.

En plein air

An approach to painting much favored by the Barbizon landscape painters and Impressionists; they frequently sketched and/or painted outdoors, direct from nature, to achieve a quick impression of light, air, and color (the sketches/paintings were often taken back to the studio for reworking into more finished works of art).

Hierarchical Scale

An artistic convention in which greater size indicates greater importance.

Pendant

An artistic, literary, or musical composition intended to match or complement another.

Guild

An association of merchants, craftspersons, or scholars in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Sublime

Awe mixed with terror (a Romantic theory put forth in 1757 by the Englishman Edmund Burke concerning the psychological basis for aesthetic enjoyment).

Bel composto

Beautiful whole. Architecture, paintings, and sculpture all work harmoniously together.

Salon des Refusés, Paris (1863)

By Emperor Napoleon III's decree, an alternative salon held in an adjacent room to show 687 of the 4000+ works rejected by the official Salon, so that the public could make up their own minds about the works by feisty artists confronting a status quo.

Bruges

City in Flanders that derived its wealth and fame from the wool trade and banking, becoming the financial clearinghouse for all of northern Europe. The Duke of Burgundy moved his court here in the early 15th century.

Poussinistes vs. Rubenistes

Classical (Academic Baroque) vs. Free baroque; colorito vs. disegno.

Atmospheric (aerial) perspective

Creates the illusion of distance by the greater diminution of color intensity, the shift in color toward an almost neutral blue, and the blurring of contours as the intended distance between eye and object increases.

Illumination

Decoration with drawings (usually in gold, silver, and bright colors), especially in medieval manuscript pages; conceived in such a way that the imagery "sheds light" on the written text.

Orientalism

Describes a tendency to portray the Near and Middle East in ways which appealed to the assumptions, tastes, fantasies, politics, and prejudices of Western audiences. Empire; fantasy; cruelty; opulence; eroticism; West depicts East; prejudice.

French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture

Established in 1648 in France by King Louis the 14th. Very conservative!! They believed in "correcting nature."

Royal Academy of Arts

Established in 1768 in London. Also conservative.

Caravaggisti

Followers of Caravaggio

Pavillon du Réalisme (1855)

One-man exhibition organized by Courbet in a separate building at the Paris Exposition Universelle; issues what amounts to a real manifesto.

Fête galante

French, "amorous festival." A type of Rococo painting depicting the outdoor amusements of French upper-class society.

Trompe l'oeil

French, "fools the eye." A form of illusionistic painting that aims to deceive viewers into believing they are seeing objects rather than a representation of those objects.

Avant-garde

From French meaning "advance guard" or "vanguard," literally "fore-ground;" refers to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics. It involves a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The term also refers to the promotion of radical social reforms.

Memento mori

From latin terms meaning "reminder of death." An object, such as a skull or extinguished candle, typically found in a vanitas image, symbolizing the transience of life.

Hierarchy of Subjects

History painting (biblical, mythological, actual events); Portraits (royalty, historical figures, common people); Landscapes; Still life; Genre

Medieval (Middle Ages)

In European history, the period of roughly 1000 years (c. 400 AD & 1400 AD) from the end of the Western Roman Empire to the Renaissance.

Chiaroscuro

In drawing or painting, the treatment and use of light and dark, especially the gradations of light that produce the effect of modeling.

Humanism

In the Renaissance, an emphasis on education and on expanding knowledge (especially of classical antiquity), the exploration of individual potential and desire to excel, and a commitment to civic responsibility and moral duty.

Graphic arts

It typically is two-dimensional and includes calligraphy, photography, drawing, painting, printmaking, lithography, typography, serigraphy (silk-screen printing), computer graphics, and bindery. Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450, the first outside of Asia. His printing press facilitated the mass-production of text and graphic art and eventually, replaced manual transcriptions altogether. During the Renaissance years, graphic art in the form of printing played a major role in the spread of classical learning in Europe. Within these manuscripts, book designers focused heavily on typeface.

Reformation

It was the schism (division) within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other early Protestant Reformers. Although there had been significant attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church before Luther, he is typically cited as the man who set the religious world aflame in 1517 with his The Ninety-Five Theses.

Di sotto in sù

Italian, "from below upward." A perspective view seen from below.

Sacra conversazione

Italian, "holy conversation." A style of altarpiece painting popular after the middle of the 15th century, in which saints from different epochs are joined in a unified space and seem to be conversing either with one another or with the audience.

Vedute

Italian, "scenic view."

Sfumato

Italian, "smoky." A smokelike haziness that subtly softens outlines in painting; particularly applied to the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Correggio.

Vanitas

Latin, "vanity." A term describing paintings (particularly 17th century Dutch still lifes) that include references to death.

Iconography

Literally, "the writing of images." The term refers both to the content, or subject of an artwork, and to the study of content in art. Includes the study of the symbolic, often religious, meanings of objects, persons, or events depicted in works of art.

Zeitgeist

Meaning spirit of the age or spirit of the time, it is the intellectual fashion or dominant school of thought that typifies and influences the culture of a particular period in time. For example, the "_" of modernism typified and influenced architecture, art, and fashion during much of the 20th century.

Incorporeal

Means without a physical body, presence or form. It is often used in reference to souls, spirits, the Christian God or the Divine.

Bourgeois

Of or characteristic of the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes.

Tenebrism

Painting in the "shadowy manner," using violent contrasts of light and dark, as in the work of Caravaggio. The term derives from the Italian word "tenebroso," which means shadowy.

Fresco

Painting on lime plaster, either dry (dry fresco, fresco secco) or wet (true, or buon fresco). In the latter method, the pigments are mixed with water and become chemically bound to the freshly laid lime plaster.

Secular

Pertaining to worldly things or to things that are not regarded as religious, spiritual, or sacred; temporal; concerned with non-religious subjects.

Medici

Powerful family dynasty of Florence that acquired its vast fortune from banking; generous patrons of art and architecture (on a scale rarely seen then or since) which profoundly reflect the era's humanistic ideals.

History painting

Term used to denote those paintings that include figures in any kind of historical, mythological, or biblical narrative. Considered since the Renaissance (until the 20th century) as the noblest form of art, they generally convey a high moral or intellectual idea, and often painted in a grand pictorial style.

Canon

Rule, e.g., of proportion. The ancient Greeks considered beauty to be a matter of "correct" proportion and sought a canon of proportion, in music and for the human figure.

Joachim Winckelman

The German scholar, widely recognized as the first modern art historian, published "Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture." He believed that classical art was superior to the "natural" art of his day, and he was instrumental in bringing to scholarly attention the differences between Greek and Roman art.

Iconoclasm

The banning or destruction of icons and religious art. In the 16th and 17th century Protestant territories, it arose from differing beliefs about the power, meaning, function and purpose of imagery in religion and religious practices.

Contrapposto

The disposition of the human figure in which one part is turned in opposition to another part (usually hips and legs one way, shoulders and chest another), creating a counter positioning of the body about its central axis. Sometimes called "weight shift" because the weight of the body tends to be thrown to one foot, creating tension on one side and relaxation on the other.

Naturalism

The doctrine that art should adhere as closely as possible to the appearance of the natural world. It, with varying degrees of fidelity to appearance, recurs in the history of Western art.

Linear perspective

The most common type of perspective, all parallel lines or surface edges converge on one, two, or three vanishing points located with reference to the eye level of the viewer (the horizon line of the picture), and associated objects are rendered smaller the farther from the viewer they are intended to seem.

Predella

The narrow ledge on which an altarpiece rests on an altar.

Engraving

The process of incising a design in hard material, often a metal plate (usually copper); also, the print or impression made from such a plate.

Allegory

The representation in a work of art of an abstract idea or concept using specific objects or human figures.

Écorché

The representation of a nude body as if without skin.

Idealization

The representation of things according to a preconception of ideal form or type; a kind of aesthetic distortion to produce idealized forms. A process in art through which artists strive to make their forms and figures attain perfection, based on pervading cultural values or their own mental image of what the ideal is.

realism

The representation of things according to their appearance in visible nature (better said, naturalism).

Attribute

The symbolic object or objects that identify a particular deity, saint, or personification in art.

Grand Tour

The traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage.

Foreshortening

The use of perspective to represent in art the apparent visual contraction of an object that extends back in space at an angle to the perpendicular plane of sight.

Façade

Usually, the front of a building; also, the other sides when they are emphasized architecturally.