15th Century Art History - Final Review

Question 1

Byzantine

Answer 1

The style and art of the Eastern Roman Empire whose capital was Constantinople. The city was renamed by Constantine in the 4th century from its original name, “Byzantium,” from which this style’s title is derived. Themes are most usually Christian but sometimes revived classical or mythological subjects, for instance fig. 9-18, the “Sacrifice of Iphegenia.” Mosaics are the chief pictorial medium and tend to be abstracted with gold backgrounds, linear designs, little or no modeling, humans with aquiline noses and almond shaped eyes, figures with downward pointed feet who do not “connect” well with their settings, a lack of perspective, isocephallism (all the figures heads are on the same horizontal line), etc.

Question 2

Icon

Answer 2

An image of a holy person or being (the saints, Holy Family, Christ, the angels or archangels, and so on) which is venerated as a sacred object and to which miracles can or have been associated.

Question 3

Isocephally

Answer 3

The compositional arrangement in which figures’ heads are lined up along the same horizontal plane

Question 4

Justinian

Answer 4

The emperor of the Byzantine empire and a great patron of the arts who commissioned Hagia Sophia in 532 and San Vitale in 526

Question 5

Madonna

Answer 5

Italian for “my lady,” which in Christian, Byzantine, and later styles of art, refers to the Virgin Mary

Question 6

Mosaic

Answer 6

A medium of colored marble pieces or glass assembled on floors or wall surfaces to create symbolic pictures, usually of holy images; glass, sometimes backed with gold, was exclusively used on walls in churches, homes, or palaces. The pieces of colored marble or glass are known as tesserae (tessera, singular). Tesserae are frequently set at slight angles to catch the light so that the finished effect makes the mosaic “vibrate” visually.

Question 7

Pendentive

Answer 7

In shape, a pendentive is rather like cutting a triangular section out of a sphere. When used in architecture it allows a half-sphere or dome to rest on a cube, concentrating the weight at four points or piers. In effect, the pendentive translates the hemisphere into the cube. Its use at Hagia Sophia permitted the 40 windows to perforate the base of the dome and create the visual effect that the dome (a symbol of heaven) was floating on a ring of light.

Question 8

Ravenna

Answer 8

An important outpost and regional capital within the Byzantine Empire

Question 9

Where was this image located?

Answer 9

Raveena