HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

HONORS ART HISTORY

STYLE
ICONOGRAPHY
COLOR WHEEL
SCULPTURE
MUSEUM VISIT
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

Introduction:
Art Appreciation does not require knowledge of the historical context of an art work or building, art
history does.

The central aim of art historians is to determine the original context of artworks. They seek to achieve a
full understanding not only of why these “persisting events” of human history look the way they do, but
also why the artistic “events” happened at all.

What unique set of circumstances gave rise to the erection of a particular building or led a specific patron
to commission an individual artist to fashion a single artwork for a certain place?

Art objects and buildings are historical documents that can shed light on the peoples who made them and
on the times of their creation in a way other historical documents cannot.

The history of art and architecture is inseparable form the study of history, although the two disciplines
are not the same.
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

Introduction: The categories of Art History

Architecture

Sculpture

Performance Arts

Conceptual Arts

Pictorial Arts ( painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography)

Craft Arts ( ceramic vessels, metal wares, textiles, jewelry, and accessories of ordinary living.)
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

Introduction: Questions to ask when studying an art object or idea.

How old is it?

Chronology- the dating of art objects and buildings.

Physical Evidence often reliably indicates an objects age. The material used for a statue or
painting- bronze, plastic or oil-based pigment,may not have been invented before a certain time,
indicating the earliest possible date someone could have fashioned the work.

Documentary Evidence also can pinpoint the date of an object or building when dated written
documentation mentions the work. For example, official records may note when church officials
commissioned a new altarpiece- and how much they paid to which artist.

Visual Evidence is also very important. The analysis of style is the art historians special sphere,
but often the most unreliable chronological criterion.
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

Introduction: Questions to ask when studying an art object or idea.

What is Style?

Periodic Style refers to the characteristic artistic manner of a specific time, usually within a
distinct culture. (ex. “Archaic Greek” , “Republican Roman” , or “Early Italian Renaissance”)

Regional Style is the term art historians use to describe variations in style tied to geography. Like
an object’s date, its provenance or place of origin, can significantly determine its character. Often
two artworks from the same place made centuries apart are more similar than contemporaneous
works from two different regions.

Personal Style the distinctive manner of individual artists or architects, often decisively explains
stylistic discrepancies among monuments of the same time and place.
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

Introduction: Questions to ask when studying an art object or idea.

What is its Subject?

Another major concern of art historians is the subject matter encompassing the story, or narrative
( the scene presented; the action’s time and place; the persons involved; and the environment and its
details).

Categories of pictorial subjects:

Religious
Historical
Mythological
Genre (daily life)
Portraiture
Landscape
Non-Objective

Other important questions to be asked are:

Who made it?
Who paid for it?
 Monet Question
What do you see here? With your partner,
make a detailed list of what you see in this
image. Do not concern yourself with
interpreting its content, but rather give a
detailed description of the work.

[ 5 minutes ]
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

STYLE:
The visual apparatus which allows the
art historian to group works into
categories and allows for the
explanations or possible explanations for
change

In their attempts to explain why art objects look the

way they do, art historians have developed various
theories.

Theory 1:
Every art style is aimed at the faithful reproduction
of nature and nothing else. Each cultural group had
its own mode of apprehending nature.

Human beings create abstract art when they feel ill

at ease with the world around them, and more
naturalistic art when they are more comfortable
with their world.
Ancient Greece

Polykleitos, Doryphoros (Spear Bearer) Roman Copy of a Bronze Original

The Classical Period Pompeii, Italy, ca 450-440 BC

This sculpture is the

embodiment of Polykleitos’s
vision of the ideal statue of a
nude male athlete and warrior.
It epitomizes the intellectual
rigor of Classical statuary
design.

The supporting leg’s function

is echoed by the straight-
hanging arm to provide the
figure’s right side with
columnar stability needed to
anchor the left side’s
dramatically flexed limbs. This sculpture gives a new animation to the
The tense and relaxed limbs body, as the Archaic smile is no longer needed
also oppose each other and the expression is now more serious.
diagonally. The head turns to
the right and the hips slightly This dynamic asymmetrical balance, this
to the left, depicting motion motion while at rest, and the resulting harmony
without movement. of opposites are the essence of the Polyleitan
style
Gothic Art

Virgin with the Dead Christ (Röttgen Pietà)

Grieving for an Emaciated Christ Figure 18--53 Rhineland, Germany ca 1300-1325

The widespread troubles of the fourteenth-century....... war, famine, and

social strife...... brought on an ever more acute awareness of suffering. This
found its way readily into religious art. The Dance of Death, Christ as the
Man of Sorrow, and the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary became favorite
themes.

A fevered and fearful piety sought comfort and reassurance in the reflection
that Christ and the Virgin Mother shared humanity’s woes. To represent
this, artists emphasized the traits of human suffering in powerful, expressive
exaggeration.

Here, the sculptor portrayed Christ as a stunted, distorted human wreck,

stiffened in death and covered with streams of blood gushing from a huge
wound.

The Virgin Mother, who cradles him like a child in her lap, is the very
image of maternal anguish, her oversized face twisted in an expression of
unbearable grief.

This statue expresses nothing of the serenity of Romanesque and earlier

Gothic depictions of Mary. Nor does it have anything in common with the
aloof, iconic images of the Theotokos with the infant Jesus in her lap
common in Byzantine art.
Gothic Art

Virgin with the Dead Christ (Röttgen Pietà)

Grieving for an Emaciated Christ Figure 18--53 Rhineland, Germany ca 1300-1325

Here the artist forcefully confronts the devout with an appalling icon of
agony, death, and sorrow that humanizes, tho the point of heresy, the sacred
personages. The work calls out to the horrified believer, “ What is your
suffering compared to this?”

The humanization of religious themes and religious images accelerated

steadily from the twelfth century. By the fourteenth century, art addressed
the private person (often in a private place) in a direct appeal to the
emotions.

As the figures of the church portals began to “move” on their columns, then
within their niches, and the became fee-standing, their details became more
outwardly related to the human audience as expressions of recognizable
human emotions.
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

STYLE:
The visual apparatus which allows the
art historian to group works into
categories and allows for the
explanations or possible explanations for
change

In their attempts to explain why art objects look the

way they do, art historians have developed various
theories.

Theory 2:
Styles change in response to social struggle.

Theory 3:
Style change can be explained only in reference to
the works themselves

Theory 4:
Change in style is a manifestation of the artist
responding to the visual and intellectual challenges.
Ancient Greece
Kouros
The Archaic Period Greece ca. 600 BC

• Emulation of the stance of

Egyptian statues.
( see Mentuemhet figure 3-40 )

• Male figures called kouros

meaning “youth” were
always depicted nude.

• This particular kouros

figure was said to have a
funerary purpose, as it once
stood over a grave in the
countryside near Athens.

• Statues such as this

replaced the Geometric
vases as the preferred form
of grave marking.
Despite the similarity with the Egyptian
prototype for figurative sculpture, these
kouros figures differ in many significant
ways. (see next slide for a discussion)
Ancient Greece

Kritios Boy, From the Acropolis

The Early Classical Period Athens, Greece, ca. 480 BC

• The youth has a slight dip to the right

hip, indicating the shifting of weight onto
his left leg. His right leg is bent, at ease.
His head turns slightly to the right.

• This figure depicts how an actual

human being stands, not the structured
stiffness of earlier sculptures.

• The sculpture was named after Kritios,

the man thought to have carved this
revolutionary sculpture.

• This is the first indication of

contrapposto in Greek statuary depicting
an increasing interest in naturalism.

• This concept had disappeared and then

reappeared during the Renaissance,
demonstrating a renewed interest in
Classical Art and ideals.
Ancient Greece

Praxitiles, Hermes and the infant Dionysos (Roman Copy of an Original)

The Late Classical Period Olympia, Greece, ca 340 BC

This was once thought to have been

created by the master Praxitiles, but
is now generally considered a copy
of the highest quality.

The depiction here has Hermes

stopping to rest on his journey to
Nysa to entrust the upbringing of
Dionysos to Papposilenos and the
nymphs. Hermes leans on a tree
trunk and his slender body forms a
sinuous , shallow S-curve that is the
hallmark of many of Praxitiles’
statues
Soft, subtle, and sensual are all
Here Hermes looks off dreamily into descriptive of a Paxitelean original.
space while he dangles a bunch of The order of beauty seen here
grapes as a temptation for the infant appeals more to the eye than to the
who is to become the Greek god of mind and replaced the majestic
the vine strength and rationalizing designs of
the 5th century BC
CEZANNE QUESTION
With your partner, discuss the organization of this painting by Gustave Courbet. Use the
art vocabulary that you currently possess as you discuss how the artist has organized the
space and how he leads our eye through the painting. Also mention the color scheme, use of
space, and overall movement of the work. Take notes as you complete this activity.

[ 5 minutes ]
Realism: The Painting of Modern Life
Gustave Courbet
”The Stone Breakers”
The Lowest of the Low 1849

Even though Courbet shunned the concept of “labels”, he used the

word realism when exhibiting his own work.

The realists argued that only the things of one’s own time, what
people can see for themselves, are “real”.

They focused their attention on the experiences and sights of

everyday contemporary life and disapproved of traditional and
fictional subjects on the grounds that they were not real and visible
and were not of the present world.

Courbet was quoted by the following in 1861:

To be able to translate the customs, ideas, and appearances of my
own time as I see them- in a word, to create a living art- this has
been my aim..... (T)he art of painting can consist only in the
representation of objects visible and tangible to the painter..... (who
must apply) his personal faculties to the ideas and the things of the
period in which he lives.......... I hold also that painting is an
essential concrete art, and can consist only of the representation of
things both real and existing...... An abstract object, invisible or
nonexistent, does not belong in the domain of painting..... Show me
an angel, and I’ll paint one” Figure 29-1
In this painting, Courbet presents the viewers with a
glimpse into the life of a rural toiler. He has captured
on his canvas, in a straightforward manner, two males.
One mature, and the other very young, these workers
are displayed in the act of breaking stones. This
activity is traditionally the lot of the lowest in society.
Their menial labor is neither romanticized nor idealized
but is shown with directness and accuracy
Realism: The Painting of Modern Life
Gustave Courbet
”The Stone Breakers”
The Lowest of the Low 1849

Courbet revealed to the viewers the

drudgery of this labor. His palette’s
dirty browns and grays convey the
dreary and dismal nature of the
task, while the angular positioning
of the older stone breakers limbs
suggest a mechanical monotony.

This interest in the laboring poor as

subject matter had special meaning
for the mid-nineteenth-century
French audience. In 1848, workers
rebelled against the bourgeois
leaders of the newly formed Second
Republic and against the rest of the
nation, demanding better working
conditions and redistribution of
property.
The army quelled the revolution in three days, but not without significant loss of life
and long-lasting trauma. The Revolution of 1848 thus raised the issue of labor as a
national concern and placed workers on the center stage, both literally and
symbolically.
Figure 29-1
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

ICONOGRAPHY:
Refers to what a work depicts and what it
means (subject matter and symbolism),as
opposed to its style

The term iconography literally means “writing of

images”.

By extension, iconography also includes the study of

symbols, images that stand for other images or
encapsulate ideas.

Iconographic symbols include: The cross or balance

scales in Christian Art.

Artists may also use attributes to identify figures in

paintings or sculptures.

Attributive examples include:

Apollo (laurel wreath, bow and arrow),
Buddha ( urna, ushnisha, and elongated earlobes)
St. Peter (keys to the kingdom of Heaven)
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

Homework Assignment:

Read the introduction of “Art Through The Ages” and used the text to define the vocabulary words listed
below. Please do not turn to the glossary for this, as there is important information in the reading that
you all need to possess. Label these notes with the “The Subjects and Vocabulary of Art History” and
place them in the correct section of your notebook with today’s date at the top of the page.

Personification- (list examples from the text) Proportion

Connoisseur- (of what does the text refer to this word) Module
School- (of what does the text refer to this word) Canon
Patrons Disproportion- ( Why is it used?)
Formal Analysis Hierarchy of scale
Contour Line Armature
Additive Light Casting
Subtractive Light Freestanding Sculpture
Actual Space Plan
Illusionistic Space
Foreshortening
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

SCULPTURE:
Sculpture in the round
Bas-relief
High-relief (haut-relief)

This is an example of sculpture in

the round. It is meant to be viewed
from all sides. Hence, “in the
round”. Artists must carefully plan
this particular type of sculpture, as it
must be compositionally sound from
360 degrees.

Khafre, from Gizeh,

Egypt, Dynasty IV 2520-2494 BCE.
ANCIENT EGYPT

Kafre, Gizeh, Egypt, Dynasty IV

Image gallery Ca 2520-2495 bc

Made of carved of extremely

hard stone called diorite which
would have been brought seven
hundred miles down the Nile
from royal quarries in the south
This sculpure shows the
enthroned king with the falcon
of the god Horus
Demonstrates the artist’s cubic
view of the human figure-
created by drawing the front
and side view of the figure on
the block of stone and then
working inward until the views
met
The figure is immobile and
firm- the body is impersonal
but the face has some
individual traits
Sculptures such as this would
serve as home for the Ka to
exist should the mummies be
destroyed.
ANCIENT EGYPT

Kafre, Gizeh, Egypt, Dynasty IV

Image gallery Ca 2520-2495 bc

The intertwined lotus and

papyrus plants between the legs
of Kafre’s throne are thought to
be symbolic of the united
Egypt.

The Falcon god Horus extends

his protective wings to shelter
Kafre’s head.
QuickTime™ and a
Kafre wears the royal fake TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
beard fastened to his chin and
wears the royal linen nemes
( the royal headdress worn by
the pharaoh containing the
uraeus cobra of kingship on the
front.)

His proportions are idealized

and are appropriate for
representing majesty.

This sculpture is indicative of

the block statue standard of
Egyptian statuary.
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

SCULPTURE:
Sculpture in the round
Bas-relief
High-relief (haut-relief)

This is an example of bas-relief sculpture. This type of

sculpture hints but does not clearly define the sculptural
space. Bas-relief more closely resembles painting than it
does sculpture in the round.

Ti watching a hippopotamus hunt

From the mastaba of Ti
Egypt, Dynasty V 2450-2350 BCE.
ANCIENT EGYPT

Ti watching a hippopotamus hunt, Saqarra, Egypt

Image gallery Dynasty V, ca 2450-2350 bc

Tomb paintings (non-royal)- landscapes were popular

(background is very active)

Ti is much larger than others (shows importance)

Ti isn’t engaging in activity- he’s watching- (shows his

importance in his society)

Action is going on after death- body does not respond, but

the spirit appreciates the activity

Scenes depicted in funerary tombs were of everyday life.

They were created as an insurance that the ka of the dead
will continue in the afterlife as it did in life on earth.

The success of the hunt in Ancient Egypt was a metaphor

for the triumph over the forces of evil.
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

Visitation, jamb statues of central doorway

Reims, France ca 1230

SCULPTURE:
Sculpture in the round
Bas-relief
High-relief (haut-relief)

This is an example of high-relief or haut-relief sculpture. This type of

sculpture is very closely related to sculpture in the round, but still
maintains some of it’s two dimensional characteristics.
Gothic Art

Visitation, jamb statues of central doorway

Statues Begin to Converse Reims, France ca 1230

At Reims the fully ripened High Gothic style also can be seen in sculpture.
At first glance, the jamb statues of the west portals of Reims Cathedral
appear to be completely detached from their architectural background

**Compare the Reims statue-columns with those of the Royal Portal of

Chartes, where the background columns occupy a volume equal to the
figures’ volume.**

The two Reims jamb statues illustrated to the right portray Saint Elizabeth
visiting Virgin Mary before the birth of Jesus. They are two of a series of
statues celebrating Mary’s life and are further testimony to the Virgin’s
central role in Gothic iconography.

The sculptor of the Visitation group reveals a classicizing bent startlingly

unlike anything seen since Roman times. The artist probably studied actual
classical statuary in France.

The Reims master even incorporated the Greek contrapposto posture. The
hips sway, and the legs bend as the knees press through the rippling folds of
the garments. The sculptor also set the figures’ arms in motion.

Not only do Mary and Elizabeth turn their faces toward each other, but they
converse through gestures.

Figure 18--24
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

COLOR:

Art is
dependent
upon the use
of color.
There is
much more
to color than
most would
think. Color
is scientific,
emotional,
and rational.
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY
HE SUBJECTS AND VOCABULARY OF ART HISTORY

Homework Assignment: Museum Visit and Essay Writing.

Knowing how to properly organize and write essays and museum visit papers is a necessary
skill in this class.. Your homework for tonight is to outline the guidelines for writing both a
successful essay and writing a successful museum visit paper. Your notes should be a
simplified version of the information that is covered at the companion website and must be
written by hand. Click the link below to visit the site. When you arrive at the companion
website for the text, you should navigate to the bottom of the left options menu. The
information that you need will be under the link with Tips: Becoming a Successful
Student.
Writing Essays and Museum Papers Effectively