Art Fundamentals-People-(2025-2026)

People of the Art Fundamentals section in the 2025-2026 Academic Decathlon art study guide.

Pliny the Elder

(23-79 CE) Ancient Roman Historian who sought to analyze historical and contemporary art in his text "Natural History"

Giorgio Vasari

(1511-74) Gathered biographies of great Italian artists and shows changing roles of artist in society in "The Lives of the Artists".

Joachim Winckelmann

(1717-68) A German scholar who studied stylistic development as related to historical context.

Hagia Sophia

(532-537 CE) In Byzantine, built the Constantinople.

Giotto di Bondone

(1267-1336/37) A Florentine known for his frescoes with a simple perspective: overlapping his figures giving the illusion of a stage. These figures were very emotional and different from Gothic works.

Lorenzo Ghiberti

(1378 - 1455) A Florentine sculptor who won a competition for the doors of Florence's new baptistery. He also made a set of doors for Florence's cathedral that took over 25 years and were called the "Gates of Paradise" by Michelangelo.

Filippo Brunelleschi

(1377-1446) Completed the dome of the cathedral in Florence with a double-shelled dome design. Developed linear perspective.

Masaccio

(1401-28) A Renaissance painter who used linear and aerial perspective in his frescoes.

Donatello

(1389-1466) Called the founder of modern sculpture. Created "David", a freestanding nude bronze statue. Near the end of his life, he created sculptures with naturalism and character.

Botticelli

(1444-1510) Created "The Birth of Venus" that established an image of female beauty.

Leonardo da Vinci

(1452-1519) A High Renaissance artist and inventor who painted "The Last Supper" and the "Mona Lisa". Used the sfumato technique.

Michelangelo di Buonarotti

(1475-1564) A High Renaissance artist who took a piece of flawed marble in a competition and turned it into his vision of "David". He was commissioned by Pope Julius II to design his tomb but this was cancelled. Later, he was again commissioned by the pope to decorate the Sistine Chapel which took 4 years.

Raphael Sanzio

(1483-1520) He was given commissions by Pope Julius II for frescoes and employed assistants to help. He painted the "School of Athens" and the "Sistine Madonna".

Giorgione

(1477/78-1510) He painted landscapes to be the subjects of his paintings. He painted "The Tempest".

Titian Vecelli

(1488-1576) A Venetian painter known for his portraits of his patrons. He painted a setting for his subjects instead of having a neutral backdrop.

Tintoretto

(1518-94) A Venetian painter who used Mannerism: the distortion of certain elements, and chiaroscuro: the use of dramatic contrasts.

El Greco

(1541-1614) Influenced by Tintoretto and associated with the Counter-Reformation. A Mannerist painter who used elongated figures.

Matthias Grünewald

(1475-1528) Known for his religious scenes. Created the Isernheim Altarpiece, a work with nine panels. Only ten of his works have survived.

Albercht Dürer

(1471-1528) Was influenced by late Gothic works but later by the Italian Renaissance. Combined the naturalistic detail of northern artists and the theoretical ideas of Italian artist. Wrote about art theories and published woodcuts and copper engravings. Created "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".

Hans Holbein The Younger

(1497-1543) A court painter to Henry VIII born in Germany. His works became the model for English painting to the nineteenth century.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

An Enlightenment author who complained against the wealth and power of very few while ordinary people suffered.

Caravaggio

(1571-1610) An Italian Baroque painter who used dramatic light and dark and naturalism. He used lower-class individuals as models and portrayed the Virgin Mary as poor.

Artemisia Gentileschi

(1593-1652) The daughter of a painter who adapted Carravaggio's techniques. Painted self-portraits and Old Testament women.

Gianlorenzo Bernini

(1593-1680) The son of a sculptor who was a child prodigy and was recognized by the Pope at 17. He was a designer in theater and made the "Ecstasy of Saint Teresa" which is set into the altar of the Cornaro Chapel. He attempted to make marble look like fabric and clouds.

Peter Paul Rubens

(1577-1640) A Baroque artist in Flanders who established a huge workshop and produced works with great energy and color.

Rembrandt van Rijn

(1606-69) A Baroque and Dutch painter, printmaker, and draftsmen. He is known for The Night Watch. For group portraits he gave some members more attention, breaking tradition. He died in poverty.

Diego Velázquez

(1599-1660) The court painter for King Philip IV of Spain. He used patches of color instead of starting from a drawing, influencing the later movement Impressionism.

Jean-Antoine Watteau

(1684-1721) He created a new genre of painting called the fête galante: depictions of nobility enjoying leisure time in the countryside.

François Boucher

(1703-70) The favorite painter of Madame Pompadour. His works took character of classical myth and put them into scenes of courtly gallantry with nubile nudes.

Honoré Fragonard

(1732-1806) Studied with Boucher and was also promoted by Madame Pompadour.

Jacques Louis David

(1748-1825) Painting with republican virtues. After the Revolution, he became the master of ceremonies for the grand revolutionary mass rallies. Later, he became a dedicated painter to Napoleon Bonaparte and painted large propagandistic canvases.

Jean Dominique Ingres

(1780-1867) Student of Jacques Louis David. Art shows the signature Neoclassical style with sharp outlines, unemotional figures, geometric composition, and rational order.

Eugène Delacroix

(1798-1863) A proponent of Romanticism that was highly imaginative, emotional, and had a dreamlike quality.

Gustave Courbet

(1819-77) Represented the Realism movement very forcefully. He outraged conventional audiences by showing a painting of ordinary workman repairing a road called "The Stonebreakers" which had many political implications in a wave of revolutions.

Édouard Manet

(1832-83) Referred to as the first Impressionist. He showed light with bright, contrasting colors. He painted "Le Dejéuner sur L'herbe" (Luncheon on the Grass) which was singled out for ridicule because of the clothed men and nude woman.

Claude Monet

(1840-1926) Showed a work called "Impression, Sunrise" that was the source of the movement's name. His urging paired with the advances in paint and brush production encouraged fellow artists to work outside.

Paul Cézanne

(1839-1906) Disliked the lack of solid form in Impressionist works. He suggested that painting could be structured as a series of planes with a clear foreground, middle ground, and background. He also thought all objects in a painting could be reduced to their simplest shape. He influenced the development of Cubism.

Georges Seurat

(1859-91) A Post-Impressionist who placed an emphasis on the scientific rules of color. He used optical mixing where he painted with small dots of complementary colors that blended together in the eye.

Vincent van Gogh

(1853-90) A Dutch painter who used contrasting colors and direct application of paint paired with twisting forms to intensely capture the bright light of southern France. He believed color should be as intense as human emotions.

Paul Gauguin

(1848-1903) A successful stockbroker who left his family in his 40s to pursue art. After working with Van Gogh for a little, he went to the island Tahiti for more intense color and an "unschooled" style.

Edgar Degas

(1834-1917) An Impressionist who was influenced by the invention of the camera and global exploration. He used the snapshot style of photography and a Japanese-like perspective from slightly above his subject.

Henri Mataisse

(1869-1954) Led a group of Post-Impressionists who used colors so intense that they appalled the public and critics. This use of arbitrary color led to them being called fauves, "wild beasts".

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque

(1881-1973) (1882-1963) Two artists in Paris who created a new system of art called Cubism where they broke figures up into multiple overlapping perspectives, creating abstract forms. They were influenced by African art and went against the popular naturalistic artworks.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde

(1880-1938) (1867-1956) Two German members of Die Brücke who took the Vauvists' arbitrary colors and combined them with the intense feelings in the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's work.

Edvard Munch

(1863-1944) Norwegian Expressionist who used intense feelings in his works.

Vasily Kandinsky

(1866-1944) The German leader of Der Blaue Reiter who painted entirely abstract pictures without an actual subject.

Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian

(1878-1935) (1872-1944) Two Russian and Dutch artists whose De Stijl canvases used total abstraction and had flat fields of primary color that has become a signature of modern art.

Josef Albers

(1888-1976) A painter, graphic artist and designer who taught at the Bauhaus. After the school was closed my Nazis, he came to the U.S. and continued to teach.

Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg

Two critics who dominated the art scene in New York during the 1950s. The latter promoted artists in abstraction.

Jackson Pollock

(1912-56) A Abstract Expressionist who didn't use a paintbrush and dripped paint directly onto the canvas.

Jasper Johns

(b. 1930) A returner to naturalism who created a series of works that featured common things such as flags, numbers, maps, and letters.

Rober Rauschenberg

(1925-2008) A returner to naturalism who created sculptures from objects he found to create "combines". He created "Bed" with his bedclothes that he painted and "Monogram" which used random items.

Andy Warhol

(1928-87) A pop artist who created soup cans, Brillo boxes, and images of movie stars with s factory-like silkscreen approach to mock the art world.

Roy Lichtenstein

(1923-97) A pop artist who recreated comic book imagery on large scale that showed the pattern of dots used to print them.

Rober Indiana

(1928-2018) A pop artist who used stencils that originally were used to produce commercial signs to create his own artistic messages.

Frank Stella

(1936-2024) A minimalist artist known for his non-objective, "hard-edge" paintings.

David Smith

(1906-65) A sculptor who used stainless steel to create large pieces that reflected the abstract minimalist sensibility.

Dan Flavin

(1933-96) A sculptor who used neon tubing to create large pieces that reflected the abstract minimalist sensibility.

Chuck Close

(1940-2021) An artist of Photorealism who created portraits.

Duane Hanson

(1925-1996) An artist of Photorealism who created sculptures of ordinary people that were similar to the Realism promoted by Gustave Courbet.

Christo

(1935-2020) Created Earthworks with the idea that landscape or architecture can be packaged. He wrapped monuments in fabric, built a 24 mile long cloth fence in California, surrounded Florida islands with pink plastic, and set up orange fabric gates in Central Park.

Jeanne-Claude

(1935-2009) Christo's partner in his Earthworks. He worked out the logistics of the projects.

Guerrilla Girls

An anonymous all-female group who wear gorilla masks to protect their identities. They use guerrilla-warfare tactics like putting up posters and giving feminist speeches.

Philip Johnson

(1906-2005) A leading modern architect of the International Style who suggested that one of the functions of art is decoration. He designed the AT&T building (550 Madison Avenue).