Late Europe and the Americas I Vocab

Calotype

a photographic process in which a positive image is made by shining light through a negative image onto a sheet of sensitized paper.

Camera Lucida

Latin for “lighted room.” It is a device in which a small lens projects the image of an object downward onto a sheet of paper.

Camera Obscura

Meaning “dark room” in Latin, an ancestor of the modern camera in which a tiny pinhole, acting as a lens, projects an image on a screen, the wall of a room, or the ground-glass wall of a box; used by artists in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries as an aid in drawing from nature.

Daguerreotype

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

Memento mori

a Latin phrase meaning ‘remember you must die’. A basic _________ painting would be a portrait with a skull but other symbols commonly found are hour glasses or clocks, extinguished candles, rotten spots on fruit, and a wilting flower.

Neoclassicism

a style of art and architecture that emerged in the later 18th century. Part of a general revival of interest in classical cultures, characterized by the utilization of themes and styles from ancient Greece and Rome.

Plan

the horizontal arrangement of the parts of a building or of the buildings and streets of a city or town, or a drawing or diagram showing such an arrangement. In an axial ____, the parts of a building are organized longitudinally, or along a given axis; in a central ____, the parts of the structure are of equal or almost equal dimensions around the center.

Romanticism

a Western cultural phenomenon, beginning around 1750 and ending about 1850, that gave precedence to feeling and imagination over reason and thought. More narrowly, the art movement that flourished from about 1800 to 1840.

Vanitas

A painting containing objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures; it exhorts the viewer to consider mortality.

Veduta

a type of naturalistic landscape and cityscape painting popular in 18th-century Venice.