Art History 2 – Flashcards

first formed in the Middle Ages with the original purpose of being available to be called out in emergencies by civic authorities. By the seventeenth century, however, despite their occasional military duties, the groups had developed into dues-paying social clubs for well-to-do Dutch citizens. They held parades through the city and firing practice in shooting galleries. Each civic guard guild was named after its weapon: the crossbowmen, longbowmen, and arquebusiers, as well as cavalry units. From the early sixteenth century onwards, the militias regularly commissioned group professional portraits, of which Rembrandt's The Night Watch is the most famous example. The Kloveniers (arquebusiers) are the guild represented in Rembrandt's painting.

A term coined to describe styles marked by the spontaneous and uninhibited application of paint, impulsive brushwork, and unstable or energetic composition, as practiced by American avant-garde painters including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

A "hidden" image within an image, which depends on a very specific viewing perspective in order to see clearly the object that is being represented.

A variant of the etching process first developed in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century that became increasingly popular from the eighteenth century onwards with artists such as Francisco Goya. These today are often made using a paint spray, but in their early history, aquatints were created using powdered rosin (derived from tree/plant resin) that was applied to the surface of the metal plate, which when put in an acid bath and printed, produced areas of subtle tonal variation in the resulting image.

a method of drawing or painting popular with Surrealist artists that strove to allow forms to emerge from unconscious thought. The goal was not to represent the world necessarily as it appeared to the eyes, but to explore the internal workings of one's own mind and creative process. When making an automatic drawing, an artist deliberately began by having no specific subject in mind and let their mind wander as their pen or brush moved along the surface.

translates literally as "light-dark" in Italian, this term describes a method of modeling in painting that uses extreme contrast between light and dark.

a pictorial technique in which pieces of cut paper of all shapes and types are combined and stuck down on to another surface to create a design. It was taken up by major artists in the early twentieth century beginning with the Cubists, who incorporated fragments of wallpaper, photographs, and especially newspapers in order both to challenge the conventions of pictorial representation and to dialogue with the social and political present.

A term coined by the American artist Robert Rauschenberg to describe the radical form of collage that he devised in which the flat painting surface is 'combined' with a wide variety of objects, including non-art found material, often resulting in a three-dimensional work that elides the boundary between painting and sculpture.

an artistic movement developed in France by painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque beginning around 1910, which constitutes a new kind of pictorial language. These paintings are characterized by small, slightly titled planes defined through gradations of light and color designed to represent simultaneous views of a subject from multiple angles and to break down the longstanding notion of painting as representing a window into the natural world.

a type of collection, dating back to the sixteenth century, that juxtaposed a diversity of objects in their displays: natural specimens of flora and fauna, exotic artifacts from foreign cultures, antiquities, as well as contemporary works of painting, sculpture, and other media. They explored the boundary between nature and art, divine and human creation. Surrealist artists looked back to the model of curiosity cabinets in their exhibiting and creative practices.

an ornate and elegant style popular in early eighteenth-century France that emphasized light, airy, and decorative qualities that extended across media from architectural interiors to painting and sculpture.

the earliest photographic process, which first came into use in the early 1840s. The exposure time was lengthy, as was the chemical process to produce it, which was based on a silver-plated sheet of copper, treated with fumes of iodine and then developed by fumes of mercury to create the reproductive image.

A technique of painting with pigments dissolved in hot wax. Used by the artist Jasper John for his Flag paintings.

A mid-twentieth-century movement in American painting characterized by abstracted forms—both gestural action painting and "color field" painting—that are associated with the psychic self-expression of the artist.

a term that refers to complex narrative subjects with numerous figures. Leon Battista Alberti discusses the type of painting in his 1435 treatise On Painting (De pictura), categorizing it as the most ambitious type of work a painter can attempt because of the difficulties in depicting emotion and dramatic narrative in a static, two-dimensional image.

emerging out of Alberti's concept of historia, these large-scale works depict grand narratives. Especially popular with artists of the Academy for display at the salon, these multi-figured compositions often represented scenes from ancient, mythological, or biblical history.

a painting technique in which layers of paint are built up thickly to create a three-dimensional effect. It creates a strong sense of highlights and light.

A late nineteenth-century movement, the name was adapted from Claude Monet's painting. Works from this movement emphasize the immediacy of observing not in detail but in the overall impression, seeming to capture a fleeting moment. This quality of the impression is also evident in the looseness of brushstrokes, the often unblended colors, and the way paint is applied. Works capture light and color, giving the impression of a moment in time. Painters were able to paint outside observing nature thanks to the invention of tube paint.

an early twentieth-century movement that explored the boundaries of what could actually be represented and sought to break with the norms of bourgeois culture. Rejecting conventions in art and thought, artists explored the disconnect between words, art, and objects in the real world. The movement was spurred by a response to the outbreak of World War I in the 1910s and by a distrust of the authoritarianism and nationalism that was increasingly sweeping Europe during these years.

These were government-sponsored art exhibitions of works by living artists that became a fixture of the Parisian art world beginning in the early eighteenth century. The first official one was held in 1725, but already in 1699 the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture initiated this exhibition practice at the Louvre in Paris. It was born out of the culture of this institution that required artists to apply for membership in order to submit works for public exhibition. They rested on the assumption that artists should be trained in a strong knowledge about the history of art from antiquity through the seventeenth century. Thus, the annual event of the Parisian one not only encouraged artists to create works for public viewing that demonstrated their knowledge of classical and art-historical tradition, but also led to public debate about the merits of different styles and genres, and thus to the emergence of the art critics like Denis Diderot (1713-1784) who served as judges and purveyors of public taste.

Now understood to describe the classicizing style that evolved in European art of the eigheenth and early nineteenth centuries in reaction to the florid sensuality of the Rococo. The term was actually devised later, in the 1880s, and was originally pejorative, denoting 'pseudo-classical', and particularly directed at Jacques-Louis David and his school. This was based in the study of ancient Greek and Roman art and attempted to convey Enlightenment values, emphasizing a return to human reason and order.

the first type of indoor exhibition space dedicated to showing projected motion pictures. Usually set up in converted storefronts, these small, simple theaters charged five cents for admission and flourished from about 1905 to 1915 before the advent of movie theatres and longer narrative films.

the mythical home of the god Apollo and the ancient Muses, a mountain in Greece from which the font of artistic and literary inspiration was said to flow. Raphael's fresco of it in the Stanza della Segnatura also reflects the etymology of the name "Vatican," which derives from the Latin word for poet (vates) and thus linked ancient poetry with the present-day creative achievements of the Vatican papal court.

A means of producing still images through the agency of light, first realized in 1839. It developed rapidly from early daguerrotypes to new innovations such as the "collotype" (the first viable commercial process for printing photographs with permanent printer's ink) and the "gelatin silver print," which became the standard medium until the invention of color photography in the mid-twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, the medium was utilized not only in the visual arts but also in journalism, science, and other documentary endeavors.

a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image. Artists including Georges Seurat developed the technique in 1886 as an offshoot of Impressionism. The term was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists, and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation.

the appropriation of non-Western (e.g. African, tribal, Polynesian) art styles, forms, and techniques by modern artists as a part of innovative and avant-garde artistic movements. The impulse implies a desire to start again, unhindered by history, by seeking contact with alternative modes and forms that are perceived as elemental and more "authentic." It thus describes a historical phenomenon that was part of developments in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western art, but one should be careful today to avoid using the label to describe any object of non-Western origin, given the derogatory and problematically biased nature of this terminology.

The sixteenth-century religious, political, intellectual and cultural upheaval that splintered Christianity in Europe, initiated when Martin Luther and other reformers challenged and ultimately rejected the authority of the Catholic Church. It is generally said to have begun in 1517 when Martin Luther published his "95 Theses" in Wittenberg, Germany. It resulted in radical changes in the approach to image-making given that one of its central critiques was of the materialist nature of Catholic devotional practice (as represented by votive gifts, cult images, and other costly artistic commissions for the church). Extreme followers of Luther also engaged in acts of iconoclasm across Europe (from German territories to the Netherlands), including a systematic dissolution of the art and treasures of English monasteries under King Henry VIII.

a kind of print created on a smooth metal plate (usually copper or zinc) with a thin layer of acid-resistant ground like beeswax. The artist creates lines by drawing freely in the soft wax material using a needle with a rounded point, which allows for a looser and often more experimental approach to the print medium. The sides and back of the plate are then covered with an acid-resistant varnish, and the plate itself is placed in an acid bath, causing the areas removed by the needle to bite into the plate and leave a line. An etching is printed like a copper engraving, but because the lines are finer, fewer good impressions (i.e. copies) of etchings can be produced.

from Ovid's Metamorphoses comes the myth of a sculptor who falls in love with his own sculpture of a female nude (Galatea), which he created out of disgust for the corrupt women he saw in contemporary society. He beseeched Aphrodite (aka Venus), the goddess of love, to answer his prayers of union with his creation, and she brought the statue to life. This myth about the power of art to impact its beholder was a popular subject matter for both painting and sculpture.

a term originated by the French artist Marcel Duchamp referring to a commonplace, mass-produced object isolated from its functional context and elevated to the status of art by the mere act of an artist's choice or selection. Duchamp envisaged it as the product of an aesthetically provocative act, one that denied the importance of taste and which questioned the boundaries of art itself.

Emerging in the late 1950s and associated primarily with the media painting, sculpture and printmaking, It drew upon the styles, subject matter, and production techniques of commercial art, product design, and mass-media imagery. It juxtaposed high and low culture by eliding commercial and consumer culture with the realm of "fine" art.

While it manifests in a number of ways and is an inherently unstable category in terms of period and style, It can at one level be understood as a late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century reaction against the reason of the Enlightenment and the order of Neoclassicism. Its manifestation in the visual arts was born out of literary genres that treat the mysterious and irrational, with dreams, nightmares, and unconscious states as central themes. Classical subject matter was largely rejected in favor of that drawn from a wide variety of literary sources, including medieval Romances, Dante, Shakespeare, and contemporary literature such as horror novels.

the Dutch word for "face" that in the seventeenth century, and particularly as a result of Rembrandt's experiments with portraiture, came to mean a genre of image dedicated to bust-length or close-up facial representations of single figures, distinguished by striking features, expressions, and/or exotic costumes. They were not considered portraits, even if they were based on the study of a particular person's features; in other words, they were anonymous "types" of faces rather than individual likenesses.

preserved paint in portable metal containers, allowing artists to carry their materials with them and paint outside. Previous to this mid-nineteenth century advancement, artists had to mix their own pigments from hand by grinding natural minerals and lacked the means to preserve and transport their paints.

A stencil method of printmaking in which a design is imposed on a screen of polyester or other fine mesh, with intended blank areas of the design coated with an impermeable substance. Ink is forced into the mesh openings by the fill blade or squeegee and onto the printing surface during the squeegee stroke. The process can be repeated multiple times with different colors of ink or paint, and different stencils, towards the creation of a single final image.

Meaning "by Scripture alone," the phrase was crucial to the key ideas of the Protestant Reformation. This doctrine maintains that Scripture, as contained in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, is the only authority for the Christian in matters of faith, life, and conduct.

a movement popular in the 1920s and 1930s that was particularly interested in exploring the new understanding of the unconscious mind as recently theorized by Sigmund Freud and the new field of psychoanalysis. These artists were interested in using techniques such as photomontage (a form of collage employing photographs), automatism, and the juxtaposition of unexpected objects and body parts to break with the tradition of art as a conscious representation of the visible world.

a French term, literally "trick the eye," for a form of realistic painting, typically artful arrangements of objects such as books, domestic items, or musical instruments, which aims to mimic as closely as possible the illusion of three-dimensional objects in space. The trope was appropriated and overturned by Cubist artists such as Georges Braque who were interested in challenging the notion of painting as pictorial illusion.