Art History

110 flashcards by MentisLibrary

Painters, sculptors, movements and techniques from the Parthenon to contemporary installation, with the works that define each period, the terms used to describe them, and the museums that hold them, for a first course in art history.

Who painted the Mona Lisa?
Leonardo da Vinci, who kept the small panel with him for years and never delivered it.
Who painted The Starry Night?
Vincent van Gogh, from the window of the asylum at Saint-Remy, working partly from memory.
Who painted Guernica?
Pablo Picasso, in response to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.
Who painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling?
Michelangelo, who worked on scaffolding for four years and considered himself a sculptor rather than a painter.
Who painted Girl with a Pearl Earring?
Johannes Vermeer, in a study of a head rather than a portrait of a known person.
Who painted The Birth of Venus?
Sandro Botticelli, for a Medici patron.
Who painted The Scream?
Edvard Munch, who made several versions in paint, pastel and print.
What is chiaroscuro?
The modelling of form through strong contrast between light and shadow.
What is a fresco?
A wall painting made by applying pigment to fresh wet plaster, so the colour binds chemically as the plaster cures.
What is a still life?
A painting of arranged inanimate objects, typically food, flowers, vessels or books.
Who painted Las Meninas?
Diego Velazquez, who put himself at the easel inside the picture.
Who painted The Night Watch?
Rembrandt van Rijn, in a group portrait of a civic militia company.
What is the Louvre?
The largest art museum in the world, housed in a former royal palace.
What is the Uffizi?
A Florentine gallery holding the greatest concentration of Italian Renaissance painting.
What is Neoclassicism?
A late eighteenth-century return to the clarity, restraint and moral seriousness of Greek and Roman art.
What is Minimalism?
Art reduced to simple geometric units, often industrially fabricated, with no illusion, gesture or hidden meaning.
Who built the Parthenon, and what was it for?
The architects Iktinos and Kallikrates built it as a temple to Athena, with sculpture supervised by Phidias.
What is contrapposto?
A standing pose in which the figure's weight rests on one leg, so the hips and shoulders tilt in opposite directions.
What is the Laocoon group?
A Hellenistic marble showing the Trojan priest Laocoon and his sons crushed by sea serpents.
What do the wall paintings at Pompeii show us?
Roman domestic painting preserved intact, including illusionistic architecture, garden scenes and mythological panels.
What are the mosaics of San Vitale famous for?
Byzantine mosaic panels showing the emperor Justinian and the empress Theodora with their courts, set in gold ground.
What is a Byzantine icon?
A devotional panel painting of a holy figure, painted to a fixed traditional scheme rather than from life.
What is an illuminated manuscript?
A handwritten book decorated with painted images, ornamented initials and gold or silver leaf.
What is the Book of Kells?
An illuminated Latin gospel book, the high point of Insular manuscript decoration.
What are the defining features of Gothic architecture?
The pointed arch, the ribbed vault and the flying buttress, which together carry weight outward and free the walls for glass.
Why is Giotto a turning point in Western painting?
He gave figures weight, volume and believable emotion at a time when painting was still flat and symbolic.
Who painted The Last Supper, and why has it decayed so badly?
Leonardo da Vinci, who painted it on dry plaster in oil and tempera rather than in true fresco, so it began flaking within his lifetime.
Who sculpted the marble David in Florence?
Michelangelo, working a single block that another sculptor had abandoned.
Who painted The School of Athens?
Raphael, as one of four frescoes for the pope's private library.
What did Brunelleschi contribute to the Renaissance?
He engineered the dome of Florence Cathedral without traditional centring, and demonstrated linear perspective.