Graphic Design History Test 1

In the early scriptoriums, the ________ was responsible for the execution of ornament and image in visual support of the text.

illuminator

In the hieroglyphic writing system, a cartouche encloses glyphs of _____.

important names

Charlemagne attempted to restore the lost glory of the Roman Empire by reviving scholarship and standardizing writing. In this Caroline graphic revival, Charlemagne ________.

imported the scholar Alcuin of York from England

The Celtic manuscript was revolutionary in terms of design innovation because writers ________.

left spaces between words

In the early fifteenth century, the Limbourg brothers created their masterpiece, ____________ , which included an illustrated calendar depicting seasonal activities of each month crowned with graphic astronomical charts.

les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry

The textura lettering style seen in Gothic manuscripts—composed of vertical strokes capped with pointed serifs—was called ________ in its time.

littera moderna

Celtic design, as seen in the Book of Kells, is best described by all but one of the following terms. Which does NOT belong?

naturalistic

The ancient Chinese invented three of the four innovations listed below. Which does NOT belong?

oil paint

King Eumenes II of Pergamum developed the process of making _________ to overcome an embargo placed by Ptolemy V during a fierce rivalry.

parchment

The Phaistos Disk contains ______ .

pictographic and alphabetic forms

The oldest extant printed manuscript from China ( 868 CE) is the _______ , which is in a scroll about sixteen feet long.

Diamond Sutra

The pages of the Pen Ts'ao medical herbal were assembled as a folded, accordion-style book, which replaced the scroll format in the ninth and tenth centuries.

Diamond Sutra

The Hangul alphabet consists of fourteen consonants represented by __________.

Abstract depictions of the mouth and tongue

The painting of bamboo from _________by Li Fangying shows how the strokes of the brush join calligraphy and painting, poetry and illustration, into a unified communication.

Album of Eight Leaves

Paleolithic cave drawings were probably created for three of the reasons below. Which does NOT belong?

Artistic expression

Three of the following are characteristics of ancient Egyptian illustrated manuscripts. Which does NOT belong?

Blurred lines used to represent movement

In the later Gothic period and in the 1400s, the________ , a private devotional text, became the most popular manuscript book produced.

Book of Hours

The final step in the evolution of Chinese calligraphy—the writing still in use today— is called ________.

Chen-shu "regular" style (also, kia-shu)

________ was an early pictographic writing system that was inscribed on oracle bones and used to convey communications between the living and the dead.

Chiaku-wen "bone and shell"

________ was a pictographic writing system inscribed on cast-bronze objects and was also used for important treaties, penal codes, and legal contracts.

Chin-wen "bronze" script

A ________ was a seal made by carving calligraphic characters into a flat surface of jade, gold, or ivory.

Chop

The _______ as a text form came to be used increasingly from 1 CE to 400 CE, partly because Christians wished to distinguish their writings from pagan formats of writing.

Codex

From the Latin for "wedge-shaped," this method of early writing used a triangular-tipped stylus, which was pushed into clay to form a series of wedge-shaped strokes.

Cuneiform

In Mesopotamia, the ownership of property and the specialization of trades and crafts made visual identification necessary. Images on _______________ became trademarks for the owner.

Cylinder Seals

A Buddhist charm, called a ________ , was printed and placed in a pagoda to help lengthen one's life.

Dharani

Around the first century BCE, the Roman alphabet—the forerunner of the one we use today—contained twenty-three letters. The letters J, V, and W were added ________.

During the middle ages

The Chinese calligraphic writing system consists of logograms, or graphic characters that represent _______.

Entire words

The Latin alphabet came to the Romans from Greece by way of the________ , who dominated the Italian peninsula in the first millennium BCE.

Etruscans

A more abstract form of hieroglyphics, called hieratic script, was developed first by early lawmakers to allow more room for extensive laws.

False

Around 2800 BCE, scribes turned pictographs 45 degrees and gave them vertical emphasis in order to increase the efficiency of writing.

False

Book of the Dead texts ranged in size from large scrolls nearly one hundred feet long to single sheets of papyrus of just a few inches square. By law, every inhabitant of Egypt had to be buried with one

False

Capitalis quadrata were capitals of the Roman Latin alphabet created for architectural inscriptions celebrating military leaders and their victories.

False

Chinese calligraphy is considered in China to be a higher art form than sculpture, but a lower art form than painting.

False

During the Han Dynasty, seals called chops were made by carving the background away from a calligraphic character. The resulting print was a red character on a white background.

False

Early pieces of type used by Pi Sheng in his movable type process were organized alphabetically by the first letter of the word they represented.

False

Illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages were costly and time consuming to produce. In addition to expensive minerals for ink, the skins of up to five animals were often required to make parchment for one text

False

In manuscripts created in the Renaissance style such as the Vatican Virgil, the text is lettered in crisp, rustic capitals. Illustrations were usually positioned at the top, middle, or bottom of the page adjacent to a single column of text.

False

In the tenth century CE, Prime Minister Feng Tao ordered the use of wood blocks to print Confucian classics so that they would be available to the masses.

False

Islamic texts such as the Qu'ran include exquisite illuminated miniatures of religious figures in narrative accounts.

False

Jean François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone and published his work in 1802, three years after the artifact was unearthed.

False

The Book of Kells, a masterpiece of Celtic design, is unique because of its textual accuracy.

False

The Chinese calligraphic system consists of about forty characters.

False

The Chinese were immediately receptive to the use of paper in its early decades because of its greater elitist appeal.

False

The Greeks, who adopted the Phoenician alphabet about 1000 BCE, changed five characters from vowel to consonant characters.

False

The Hangul writing system—the Korean alphabet—is based on the Chinese writing system but is more complex.

False

The Phaistos Disk was excavated on the island of Crete around 2000 BCE. It might have originated elsewhere, but no evidence supports this theory.

False

The demotic writing script, used for secular legal and commercial writing, developed around 400 CE.

False

The edubba, or "tablet house," was merely a storage place for important texts.

False

The frontispiece of a manuscript is the front cover, usually made of ivory or precious metals encrusted with semiprecious gems.

False

The pages of the Pen Ts'ao medical herbal were assembled as a folded, accordion-style book, which replaced the scroll format in the ninth and tenth centuries.

False

The serif, or ending line extending from the main stroke of a letter, originated from rustic capitals inscribed in wax tablets.

False

The uncial letter, originally invented by the Greeks, was drafted on four guidelines. It was the basis of our lower case letters.

False

Uncials, letterforms developed by the Romans, were well proportioned, well spaced, and intended to be legible from a distance. These letters were carved on monuments.

False

Vellum was the finest form of papyrus, and widely used as pages for the early codex books.

False

When Shitao Yuanji created Album of Eight Leaves, he demonstrated the ability of Chinese calligraphy to evoke natural objects.

False

The invention of musical notation has also been attributed to scribes working in medieval monasteries.

True

The letter _______________ was designed by Spurius Carvilius around 250 BCE to replace the Greek letter zeta, which at the time was of little value to the Romans.

G

________ was a bold, inscriptional Arabic lettering with extended, thick characters used widely on coins, manuscripts, and inscriptions on metal and stone.

Kufic

Each script below is found on the Rosetta Stone but one. Which does NOT belong?

Latin

When the Greeks adopted Phoenician writing, the system employed a directionality called boustrophedon. Eventually, however, the Greeks adopted a ______ direction for their writing that has continued to this day.

Left to right

Phoenicia of the second millennium BCE developed a ______ society that contributed to the alphabetic system.

Merchant

China became the first society in which ordinary people were in daily contact with printed images because of the use of printed ________ around the year 1000 CE.

Money

The Greeks modified Phoenician letter shapes by making them ________.

More geometrically structured

Like the Sumerians, who used mud to create clay tablets, the Egyptians made good use of their natural resources. They created a paper like substrate for manuscripts out of

Papyrus

_____ are carved or scratched signs or simple figures on rocks.

Petroglyphs

An alphabet is a series of simple visual symbols that represent ______.

Speech sounds

________ , a Chinese government official, is credited with the invention of paper in 105 CE, although the Chinese might have invented it before then.

T'sai Lun

Around 1500 BCE, Semitic workers in the Sinai desert developed an acrophonic adaptation of Egyptian hieroglyphics. In an acrophonic text, pictographs are used to represent ________.

The initial sound of the object depicted

The hieroglyphic system, directionally was not standardized. The reader began from the direction in which living animals were facing, but sometimes the direction in the text changed

True

Many examples of Moorish-influenced manuscripts from Spain are texts on _______.

The book of revelation

A book of the dead is a narrative of

The passage of the deceased into the afterlife

The illustrations and decorations in illuminated manuscripts were intended to educate the reader as well as beautify the book.

True

Writing may have evolved in Sumeria because ancient temple chiefs needed _____.

To keep records systematically

According to early mythology and tradition, Cadmus, King of Phoenicia, brought the alphabet to Greece.

True

Aniconism was a common theme used in Islamic manuscripts.

True

Around 2000 BCE, the Phoenicians developed an early alphabetic writing system called sui generis, which was a script devoid of any pictorial meaning.

True

Charlemagne's scribes at Aachen developed a legible writing style using minuscule letters that became the forerunner to our own system of upper and lowercase letters.

True

Chinese calligraphy is a purely visual language.

True

Illustrations in late medieval illuminated manuscripts from the fifteenth century are characterized by elongated, vertical figures and increased naturalism.

True

In contrast to Western writing, Chinese calligraphic strokes express spiritual states and deep feelings.

True

In hieroglyphics, determinatives were signs that determined how the preceding glyph should be interpreted.

True

Influenced by the half-uncials, Caroline miniscules are the forerunners of our contemporary lowercase or small-letter alphabet.

True

Pi Sheng developed a method of printing with movable type in the eleventh century CE .

True

Relief printing is the process of removing the negative spaces surrounding an image and inking the raised surface, which is then rubbed onto paper.

True

Rustic capitals, compressed letterforms similar to square capitals, were more economical than square capitals for use on substrates such as parchment and papyrus.

True

Some time before 1000 BCE, the Phoenicians had knowledge of Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and probably Minoan symbols.

True

The "bone and shell" style of writing that was used from 1800 to 1200 BCE was closely related to the art of communicating with dead ancestors.

True

The Aramaic alphabet developed into different alphabets, including Hebrew and Arabic, in different geographic regions.

True

The Blau Monument (3750 BCE) may be the oldest extant artifact that combines words and images.

True

The Egyptians were the first people to produce illustrated manuscripts in which words and pictures combined to communicate information.

True

The Haggadot are Judaic texts containing Jewish historical accounts and proverbs.

True

The development of writing had its earliest origins in simple pictures, for a close connection exists between the drawing of pictures and the markings of writing.

True

The earliest datable relief printing from China is from around 770 CE.

True

The invention of the alphabet and the subsequent spread of literacy had a leveling effect on society; it eventually diminished the power of priests/scribes found in earlier societies.

True

The invention of writing promoted stabilization in society, as with, for example, the guarantees that came with the standardization of measurements and weights.

True

The modern book format, which replaced the scroll in Rome and Greece beginning at the time of Christ, was made by gathering parchment into signatures and binding them to form codices.

True

The principle of movable type was used in a Western culture as early as 2000 BCE and was first seen on the Phaistos Disk found on Crete.

True

The scarab beetle in ancient Egyptian society was associated with the sun god Kheper and the idea of resurrection. The scarab seal came to be used as a means of marking ownership and as a magical charm.

True

The third phase in Chinese calligraphic writing was the standardization of characters into the hsiao chuan style developed by Prime Minister Li Ssu.

True

The transition from large, introductory script to smaller text is called a diminuendo.

True

Writing in ancient Sumeria took on magical and ceremonial qualities; the general public regarded scribes with awe because of their mysterious knowledge.

True

The Stele of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE) is an artifact of Babylonian culture written in cuneiform. The text contains _____.

a code of laws and consequences for violating them

In the fourth century BCE, Alexander the Great expanded Greek culture throughout the known world. Writing became more important than ever because_______.`

an oral culture could no longer manage knowledge and information`

Manuscripts in the _________ style were often lettered in rustic capitals in one wide column on each page, with illustrations the same width as the text column framed in bright bands of color.

classical

The Vatican Virgil, an example of the ________ manuscript style, includes Virgil's Aeneid and the Georgics.

classical

The _________ of a manuscript or book is an inscription, usually at the end, containing facts about its production.

colophon

Between the scroll and the stitched book, the Chinese had a transitional format that resembled__________.

folded scrolls (with accordion-style folds)

The ancient Egyptians inherited the use of _________ from the Sumerians.

identification seals

In the hieroglyphic writing system, words that were difficult to express in visual form were written using _______________ , in which words and syllables are represented by pictures of objects and by symbols whose names are similar to the word or syllable to be communicated.

rebus

Islamic illuminated manuscripts are characterized three of the elements below. Which does NOT belong?

religious icons

Production of illuminated manuscripts in the monasteries included the work of the________ , who were well-educated scholars functioning as editors and art directors with overall responsibility for manuscripts' design and production.

scrittori

Some of the earliest examples of visual communications known are the Paleolithic cave drawings found in _____.

the Lascaux caves in France

According to legend, calligraphy was invented about 1800 BCE by Ts-ang Chieh, who was inspired by________.

the claw marks of birds and the footprints of animals

Printing with movable type never came into extensive use in the Far East because

the sheer number of characters made the process too tedious

During the Romanesque period (c. 1000-1150 CE), manuscript design elements of different regions began to blend. One reason is that styles were cross-fertilized when ________.

travel increased during crusades and pilgrimages

Finished papyrus sheets had an upper surface of horizontal fibers called the recto, and a bottom surface of vertical fibers called the verso.

true

Interlace and lacertine patterns in intricate Celtic designs were often created by scribes with the use of drafting instruments.

true

As early as the second century CE, the Greeks developed a more rounded writing style called _________ , which could be written more quickly.

uncials

So named because they were written between two guidelines that were one inch apart, __________ were rounded, freely drawn letters more suited to rapid writing.

uncials