Key Terms in Art History and Architecture

Anthropocene

The geological time that refers to a period in which human activities have irrevocably altered earth systems.

Early Modern

A broad term that refers to the period between the Medieval period and the Modern, roughly 13th-14th century up to the 19th century.

Industrialization

The process beginning with the Industrial Revolution that commenced in Britain of machine production.

Medieval

From Latin Medium aevum, between eras, 'of or relating to a period of time intervening between (periods designated as) ancient and modern.'

Mendicant orders

Religious orders who are not cloistered, but preach in the community and who live on charitable donations.

Peasant

A member of a class of men and women who work the land held by a lord or landowner in exchange for protection and who present the major portion of the product of their labor to the lord.

Political structure

Term for an organized political system, including republic or monarchy.

Postmodernism

Name for a period after-Modernism which is characterized by a plurality of approaches and a rejection of ideology and theory.

Content

Refers to the subject matter and any aspect of the meaning or ideas communicated.

Genre

The term used to refer to the type of content.

Impasto

The term used to describe paint that is built up on the surface of a painting, creating actual texture on its surface.

Illusionism

A style of painting in which the artist aims to create an illusion of a reality into which beholders can actually seemingly enter.

Licked Surface

A painting in which an artist has applied paint in very thin layers so as to conceal any evidence of brush work or the application of paint.

Linear Perspective

A mathematical system for representing three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface.

Monumental painting

A style of painting that first develops in Italy that emphasizes large scale works with figures of monumental proportions.

Movable Type

Name given to a method developed in the 15th century and utilized up into the twentieth-century of casting individual letters and typographical symbols.

Naturalism

The way in which an artist creates a style that looks to viewers' eyes recognizable of how they experience the appearance of the world around them.

Old Master

The term applied to artists, particularly the admired Renaissance and Baroque masters who are squarely within the art historical canon.

Orthagonal

The term for the horizontal axes that become diagonal in the system of linear perspective

Painterly

Loose, visible brushwork, suggests fluid, easy application, visible application

Panel painting

Painting on a wood support; panel paintings often incorporated a frame. When altarpieces they are large and made of many panels. In the early Renaissance these are often gilded.

Personification

A figure representing an abstract concept

Perspectival recession

The term for the appearance an artist creates in a two dimensional image of spatial depth.

Polyptych

A panel painting composed of multiple panels

Portrait

A painting that represents a historical individual (someone who actually lived) with specific recognizable features (whether based on textual or pictorial descriptions or an actual encounter with that person), or one that convincingly suggests that it represents individual facial characteristics and features.

Proportion

Calculated mathematical relationship between parts of a whole in which parts exist in seeming harmony one with the other.

Pinnacle

Sharply pointed ornament that caps pillars

Realism

This term can refer to an individual stylistic approach in which an artist resists any idealization, prettification or perfection of nature. In addition, the subject matter of representation would have been considered low, base, problematic or distasteful—something difficult to look at and that before the seventeenth century was not represented in art and even in the seventeenth century was often considered inappropriate. The term Realism is also used to refer to a nineteenth-century artistic movement.

Register

A horizontal band which frames a scene or scenes

Satire

A genre of art or literature that ridicules or mocks, bringing to light the follies or vices of a subject.

Style

The term for describing the specific artistic characteristics (form, color, texture, light etc) that an artist or culture manipulates and that give a recognizable appearance to how something looks. There is individual style, regional style and period styles.

Technique

Refers to the materials and methods of using them

Vanishing Point

The term for the point at which all orthogonals converge in a system of linear perspective

Apse

A semi-circular or polygonal area of end of a church. Typically houses the high altar and is the most holy part of a church. Was often accessible only to clergy or members of religious order.

Crossing

The section of a Latin-cross plan church in which the nave and transept meet. Very often the crossing will be domed.

Meridian/Spur

Name for one of the vertical supports between the eight ribs in the internal structure of Brunelleschi's Cupola

Nave

The area accessible to the congregation that constitutes the dominant axis of a Latin cross plan church

Oratory

The term for an intimate or private space devoted to prayer and/or religious music.

Transept

The area of a church that intersects at right angles with the nave (short arm of a Latin cross)

Renaissance Art

In Italy, roughly the period 1200 to 1600; However this is also often broken into smaller units. 1200-1400 Early Renaissance; 1400-1480 Renaissance and 1480-1520 High Renaissance; sixteenth century art is still Renaissance, but in Italy much of it is subsumed under the label of Mannerism.

Altarpiece

A painting that is hung or positioned above an altar to direct the devotions of the faithful.

Apse

A semi-circular or polygonal area of end of a church, typically houses the high altar and is the most holy part of a church.

Book of Hours

A devotional book for personal use, organized around the liturgical calendar and providing devotions for every day.

Burin

A very sharp lozenge-shaped tool with a fine point that is used to incise into a metal plate in engraving.

Centrally-planned building

A building organized around a central space (often domed) and in which every side is identical.

City-States

A term generally referring to the early independent republican periods in Florence, Siena and Venice, when power was held by a group of wealthy male citizens.

Chastity

One of the vows declared by members of religious orders, defined as purity and complete renunciation of sexuality.

Cloth of honor

A luxury textile used for ceremonial adornment in order to show honor towards an individual.

Crushed relief

(Relievo schiacciato) Refers to the very shallow relief developed first by Donatello.

Cupola

Italian word for dome.

Devotional painting

A painting typically placed in a domestic setting and used for prayer.

Donor portraits

Portraits of the patrons within a religious or historical painting, often shown kneeling.

Duecento

Italian term for the 1200s.

Duomo

Italian word for cathedral.

Engraving

A technique of making a print by incising parallels lines into a copper plate with a burin.

Ergotism

A disease contracted by eating bad rye, which causes intense fever, gangrene and eventually death if untreated.

Expiation

An act done in atonement for sin.

Foundling Hospital

A hospital for orphans.

Fresco and buon fresco

"Fresco" usually refers to buon fresco, or painting on wet plaster.

Guild

A professional organization to which artists, artisans and craftsman belonged and that regulated professional activities.

Microscopic-telescopic vision

A term applied to Netherlandish art, particularly to Jan Van Eyck, who manages to paint every object with remarkable descriptive ability.

Narrative

A story which marks a passage of time and has a beginning, middle and end.

Oil paint

A binder for pigment first introduced in northern Europe, modified by 15th century Flemish painters.

Pascal lamb

The name given to the lamb symbolizing Christ's sacrifice, seen in Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece.

Polyptych

A panel painting composed of multiple panels.

Predella

Shallow base of an altarpiece that supports it—generally painted with small scenes.

Punchwork

The technique of punching patterns into a support, often used in panel painting to give texture and patterning to gold leaf.

Reliquary

A shrine for relics, pieces of a saint's body or objects that had close contact with the person of a saint.

Tempera

A binder for pigment made of egg yolk.

Trecento

Italian term for the thirteen hundreds.

Winged retable

A hinged altarpiece painting with wings.

Jodocus Vijd/Elisabeth Borluut

Patrons of the Ghent Altarpiece.

Chiaroscuro

used to refer to a system of lighting that is characterized by bold contrasts of light
and shadow

Gracefulness

Term used in High Renaissance to refer to the quality of beautiful movement or action.

Serpentine figure

A figure that adheres to a serpentine or ‘S’ shaped curve, believed to evoke motion and to be both life-like and beautiful

Counter Reformation

The cultural response mounted by the Catholic Church in response to
the Reformation and large groups of reformers leaving the church. The Counter-Reformation
aimed to reform art, to purify it, remove nudity or any indecency, and to persuade the men and
women back into the Church by means of appealing to their senses through the arts

Baroque

A problematic stylistic term that was originally coined to condemn the architecture of
Borromini. It has come to describe the dramatic effects employed by seventeenth-century artists,
above all in Catholic countries, who employed dramatic light effects, movement and theatrical
effects to move the spectator. It is best used sparingly and is most appropriate to describe
architecture