Intro to Humanitites Ch.5 Vocab

Gothic

An architectural style of the late Middle Ages featuring great height and the dissolution of the wall, created with pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and large expanses of windows filled with stained glass, among other features; label coined by a critic of the style who called it barbaric "like the Goths who destroyed the Roman Empire."

Classicism

The balanced, harmonious, often mathematical characteristics of art and architecture in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athens and those aspects of Roman art that were heavily influenced by artists of that period; also used for all subsequent art and architecture created in that style.

Dutch School

Group of painters producing intensely realistic art, centered in Holland during the seventeenth century, with Rembrandt the outstanding example.

abstract art/abstract expressionism

Art that takes from reality only what the artist wants or that renders a visual depiction of concepts in the artist's mind; the result is a work of art that in no way resembles the familiar world.

Surrealism

Modern style associated with the work of Salvador Dalí, among others, in which recognizable objects are put together in bizarre contexts that seem like visualizations of dreams.

Post-Impressionism

A broad term used by art historians to identify a movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in which artists working in various styles used color to express emotion and to create symbolic meaning, rather than to record optical effects (as in Impressionism).

likeness

The reproduction by an artist of a person or landscape with the aim of being as close to reality as possible; popularity began to diminish with the invention of photography in the nineteenth century.

postmodernism

A late twentieth-century movement in the arts that departs from modernism and is characterized by skepticism, among other features.

fresco

Artwork painted on the walls of churches and public buildings, popular in the Renaissance, in which the artist applies paint to wet plaster.

psychological realism

The manner in which such artists as Leonardo and Rembrandt are able to convey the inner life of their figures.

modernism

Refers less to a particular art movement than to art produced in the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries.

Digital art/multimedia art

Art created through technology, including art created by computer and through the use of sound and/or light.

perspective

Technique of rendering, on a plane or curved surface, objects moving back in space as they appear to natural vision; developed and refined during the early Italian Renaissance.

chiaroscuro

An Italian term describing the strong contrast of dark shadow and bright light in a work of art.

Golden Section

Aesthetically pleasing relationship between the two sides of a plane (like a rectangle), such that the shorter is to the longer as the longer is to the sum of both. The ratio is 1 to 1.68.

collage

A work of art in which a variety of materials such as newsprint, magazine pictures, crepe paper, even glass and wood are glued together, forming a new whole.

alteration

How the modern artist changes reality by adding to it shapes, lines, and even colors not found in nature.

installation art

Three-dimensional art that is often site-specific and designed to transform the viewer's perception of space.

Impressionism

A mid-nineteenth-century avant-garde art movement wherein the attempt to be realistic is abandoned and instead the artist projects onto the canvas the optical effects of form perceived through color and light. The artists treated themes of modern life, in both urban and landscape environments.

Pop Artrealism

Style of mid-twentieth-century art derived from popular culture and influenced by comic books, movies, television commercials, and billboard advertising; can be just plain fun or satiric.

realism

An approach to art in which subjects are rendered as likeness, without idealization.

Renaissance

The period of artistic, political, and social movements that began in fourteenth-century Italy, then spread throughout western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; characterized by renewed interest in the classical world, and also marking the end of medievalism and the emergence of the modern world.

Cubism

An artistic movement of the early twentieth century, epitomized by Picasso, in which the artist abandons Western methods of perspective and modeling; forms are broken down into geometric shapes, arranged in a flattened, two-dimensional space, and viewed from multiple vantage points at the same time.

performance art

Art as an event that generally exists only for the time it takes for the presentation or installation. The wrapped buildings, surrounded islands, and other such installations may be kept for longer periods of time, but not indefinitely.

imitation

The transference of what is experienced either outside or inside the artist to a medium of art; it can mean an idealized reproduction (as in classicism), a faithfully realistic one (as in the Dutch school), or an externalization of what exists in the artist’s mind (as in abstract art).

media

The particular materials in which a given artist works, such as paint, acrylic, charcoal, stone, or even tires, mufflers, broken pieces of glass, etc.