Western Art History Exam 1 Terms

Geometric

(of a design) characterized by or decorated with regular lines and shapes.

Peristyle Court

:a colonnade surrounding a building or court

Composite View

A convention of representation in which part of a figure is shown in profile and another part of the same figure is shown frontally; also called twisted perspective.

Karnak

A village in Egypt on the River Nile, now largely amalgamated with Luxor. It is the site of the northern complex of monuments of ancient Thebes, including the great temple of Amun.

Nubia/ Kush

The Kingdom of Kush or Kush (/kʊʃ, kʌʃ/) was an ancient kingdom in Nubia, located at the confluences of the Blue Nile, White Nile and River Atbara in what is now Sudan and South Sudan.

Nemes Headdress

The striped headcloth worn by pharaohs in ancient Egypt. It covered the whole crown and back of the head and nape of the neck (sometimes also extending a little way down the back) and had two large flaps which hung down behind the ears and in front of both shoulders.

Incising

To engrave designs, writing, or other marks into.

Canon of Proportions

Using. a grid composed of 18 equal squares, this strict system of measurement. divided the body into 18 equal parts from the hairline to the soles of the. feet.

Henge

a Neolithic monument of the British Isles, consisting of a circular area enclosed by a bank and ditch and often containing additional features including one or more circles of upright stone or wood pillars: probably used for ritual purposes or for marking astronomical events, as solstices and equinoxes.

Akkadian

a Semitic inhabitant of central Mesopotamia before 2000 b.c.

Bitumen

a black viscous mixture of hydrocarbons obtained naturally or as a residue from petroleum distillation. It is used for road surfacing and roofing.

Lapis Lazuli

a bright blue metamorphic rock consisting largely of lazurite, used for decoration and in jewelry.

Post and Lintel

a building system where strong horizontal elements are held up by strong vertical elements with large spaces between them.

Cartouche

a carved tablet or drawing representing a scroll with rolled-up ends, used ornamentally or bearing an inscription.

Necropolis

a cemetery, especially a large one belonging to an ancient city.

Pigment

a coloring matter or substance.

Canopic Jar

a covered urn used in ancient Egyptian burials to hold the entrails from an embalmed body.

Register

a horizontal level in a work that consists of several levels, especially where the levels are clearly separated by lines; modern comic books typically use similar conventions.

Mortise and Tenon

a joint made by inserting tenon on one piece into mortise holes in the other

Sumerian

a language of unknown affinities that was the language of the Sumerians and had, in the late 4th and 3rd millenniums b.c., a well-developed literature that is preserved in pictographic and cuneiform writing and represents the world's oldest extant written documents.

Hypostyle Hall

a large room with columns. Most of the room was dark except for the centre aisle which was lit by small windows cut into the roof. This hall represented a marsh in the beginning of time. It was filled with columns that looked like papyrus plants.

Inlay

a layer of fine material inserted in something else, especially for ornament.

King List

a list of the names of seventy-six kings of Ancient Egypt, found on a wall of the Temple of Seti I at Abydos, Egypt.

Papyrus

a material on which to write, prepared from thin strips of the pith of this plant laid together, soaked, pressed, and dried, used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

Achaemenid

a member of the ruling house of ancient Persia generally considered historically important from the assumption of power by Cyrus the Great (559 b.c.) to the overthrow of Darius III (330 b.c.)

Serdab

a narrow chamber of the ancient Egyptian mastaba either concealed or accessible only by a narrow passage and containing a statue of the deceased

Prehistoric

a period in mankind's artistic development. It predates writing, printmaking and basically encompasses the genesis of both early sculpture and painting

Shaman

a person regarded as having access to, and influence in, the world of good and evil spirits, especially among some peoples of northern Asia and North America. Typically such people enter a trance state during a ritual, and practice divination and healing.

Lotus

a plant believed to be a jujube or elm, referred to in Greek legend as yielding a fruit that induced a state of dreamy and contented forgetfulness in those who ate it.

Nile River

a river in E Africa, the longest in the world, flowing N from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean. 3473 miles (5592 km) long; from the headwaters of the Kagera River, 4000 miles (6440 km) long.

Pharaoh

a ruler in ancient Egypt.

Raised Relief

a sculptural technique where the sculpted elements remain attached to a solid background of the same material.

Dynasty

a sequence of rulers from the same family, stock, or group

Cylinder seal

a small, barrel-shaped stone object with a hole down the center and an incised design or cuneiform inscription

Aten

a solar deity declared by Amenhotep IV to be the only god, represented as a solar disk with rays ending in human hands.

Ka

a spiritual entity, an aspect of the individual, believed to live within the body during life and to survive it after death.

Sarcophagus

a stone coffin, typically adorned with a sculpture or inscription and associated with the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Rome, and Greece.

Megalithic

a stone of great size, especially in ancient construction work, as the Cyclopean masonry, or in prehistoric Neolithic remains, as dolmens or menhirs.

Obelisk

a stone pillar, typically having a square or rectangular cross section and a pyramidal top, set up as a monument or landmark.

Trilithon

a structure consisting of two large vertical stones (posts) supporting a third stone set horizontally across the top (lintel). It is commonly used in the context of megalithic monuments.

Dolmen

a structure usually regarded as a tomb, consisting of two or more large, upright stones set with a space between and capped by a horizontal stone.

Hieroglyph

a stylized picture of an object representing a word, syllable, or sound, as found in ancient Egyptian and other writing systems.

Hierarchical Scale

a technique used in art, mostly in sculpture and painting, in which the artist uses unnatural proportion or scale to depict the relative importance of the figures in the artwork.

Luxor

a town in S (Upper) Egypt, on the Nile: ruins of ancient Thebes.

Sedentism

a transitioning process that sees a nomadic population being placed into more permanent registrable settlements.

Cartonnage

a type of material used in Ancient Egyptian funerary masks from the First Intermediate Period to the Roman era. It was made of layers of linen or papyrus covered with plaster.

Sculpture in the Round

a type of sculpture in which the figures are presented in complete three-dimensional form and are not attached to a flat background

Tell el-Amarna

a village in central Egypt, on the Nile: site of the ancient Egyptian city of Akhetaton; extensive excavations.

Mastaba

an ancient Egyptian tomb rectangular in shape with sloping sides and a flat roof, standing to a height of 17-20 feet (5-6 m), consisting of an underground burial chamber with rooms above it (at ground level) in which to store offerings.

Step Pyramid

an architectural structure that uses flat platforms, or steps, receding from the ground up, to achieve a completed shape similar to a geometric pyramid.

Stylus

an instrument of metal, bone, or the like, used by the ancients for writing on waxed tablets, having one end pointed for incising the letters and the other end blunt for rubbing out writing and smoothing the tablet.

Serekh

an ornamental vignette combining a view of a palace facade and a plan (top view) of the royal courtyard.

Stele

an upright stone slab or pillar bearing an inscription or design and serving as a monument, marker, or the like.

Pylon

an upright structure that is used for support or for navigational guidance, in particular.

Venus Figure

any Upper Paleolithic statuette portraying a woman, although the fewer images depicting men or figures of uncertain sex, and those in relief or engraved on rock or stones are often discussed together.

Corbel

any bracket, especially one of brick or stone, usually of slight extent.

Bronze

any of various alloys consisting essentially of copper and tin, the tin content not exceeding 11 percent.

Polytheistic

belief in many gods

Cuneiform

denoting or relating to the wedge-shaped characters used in the ancient writing systems of Mesopotamia, Persia, and Ugarit, surviving mainly impressed on clay tablets.

Polychromatic

having or exhibiting a variety of colors.

Modeling (additive)

in sculpture, working of plastic materials by hand to build up form. ... Modeling is an additive process, as opposed to carving, the other main sculptural technique, in which portions of a hard substance are cut away to reveal form.

Fertile Crescent

is a crescent-shaped region containing the comparatively moist and fertile land of otherwise arid and semi-arid Western Asia, the Nile Valley and Nile Delta. It was created by the inundations of the surrounding Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris rivers.

Manetho

is believed to have been an Egyptian priest from Sebennytus (ancient Egyptian: Tjebnutjer) who lived during the Ptolemaic era in the early 3rd century BC.

Ceramic

made of clay and hardened by heat.

Ziggurat

mud or brick levels to raise buildings

Monochromatic

of or having one color.

Paleolithic

of or relating to the earliest period of the Stone Age characterized by rough or chipped stone implements

Neolithic

of or relating to the latest period of the Stone Age characterized by polished stone implements

Mesolithic

of, relating to, or being a transitional period of the Stone Age between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic

Demotic

of, relating to, or written in a simplified form of the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing

Nome

one of the provinces of ancient Egypt.

Representational Art

references objects, or events in the real world.

Negative Space

refers to the background

Positive Space

refers to the main focus of a picture

Low Relief

relief sculpture in which the figures project slightly from the background.

Sunken Relief

sculptural relief in which the outlines of modeled forms are incised in a plane surface beyond which the forms do not project

High Relief

sculptured relief in which volumes are strongly projected from the background.

Stone Age

the first known period of prehistoric human culture characterized by the use of stone tools

Babylonian

the form of the Akkadian language used in ancient Babylonia

Carving (subtractive)

the oldest form of sculpture and involves removing material, as in wood carving or stone sculpture, to create a finished work.

Clerestory

the upper part of the nave, choir, and transepts of a large church, containing a series of windows. It is clear of the roofs of the aisles and admits light to the central parts of the building.

Idealism

treatment of subject matter in a work of art in which a mental conception of beauty or form is stressed, characterized usually by the selection of particular features of various models and their combination into a whole according to a standard of perfection.