Art history Flashcards
which began around 40,000 bce at the latest, was arguably the most important era in the entire history of art. It was then that humans invented the concept of recording the world around them in pictures, often painted on or carved into the walls of caves.
Human survived by hunting animals and grabbing edible plants for food.
Means old stone
Paleolithic Period
describes all arts and crafts created by societies who had abandoned the semi-nomadic lifestyle of hunting and gathering food in favour of farming and animal husbandry.
Means New Stone Age
Neolithic Period
When humans first gave up the dangerous and uncertain life of the hunter and gatherer for the more predictable and stable life of the farmer and herder, the change in human society was so significant that historians justly have dubbed it the
Mesopotamia
Neolithic Revolution
is a magical modality that involves symbolically imitating the desired outcome. It may involve acting on a physical representation of a target or creating a physical representation of the outcome or recreating the desired outcome through motion and art.
sympathetic magic
a tall upright stone of a kind erected in prehistoric times in western Europe.
Menhir
a megalithic tomb with a large flat stone laid on upright ones, found chiefly in Britain and France.
Dolmen
a prehistoric monument consisting of a circle of stone or wooden uprights.
Henge
is a building system where strong horizontal elements are held up by strong vertical elements with large spaces between them.
Post and lintel
the resistance of a material to breaking under compression
Compression strength
refers to the ability of a structure to resist loads without failure because of excessive stress or deformation. Tensile strength is often referred to as ultimate tensile strength and is calculated by dividing the peak tension force the sample withstands by its cross sectional area.
Tension(tensile) strength
government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided.
theocracy
is a technique used in art, mostly in sculpture and painting, in which the artist uses unnatural proportion or scale to depict the relative importance of the figures in the artwork.
hierarchy of scale
the belief in many gods
Polytheistic religion
ancient Egyptian concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice
Ma’at
a principal aspect of the soul of a human being or of a god
ka
rectangular superstructure of ancient Egyptian tombs, built of mud-brick or, later, stone, with sloping walls and a flat roof.
Arabic for bench
mastaba
a narrow chamber of the ancient Egyptian mastaba either concealed or accessible only by a narrow passage and containing a statue of the deceased
serdab
a cemetery, especially a large one belonging to an ancient city.
necropolis
a granular crystalline igneous rock commonly of acid plagioclase and hornblende , pyroxene , or biotite .
diorite
were a people of diverse origins, possibly from Western Asia, who settled in the eastern Nile Delta some time before 1650 BC
Hyksos
In architecture, an engaged column is a column embedded in a wall and partly projecting from the surface of the wall, sometimes defined as semi or three-quarter detached.
engaged column
is that column or pillar which is carved out from a rock without a basic support at the ground level. It is free standing and is not connected or linked with a wall. This kind of architecture is usually found among Egyptian architecture and is common in tombs built by Etruscan and Egyptians.
reserve column
Some rock-cut architecture, mostly for tombs, is excavated entirely in chambers under the surface of relatively level rock. If the excavation is instead made into the side of a cliff or steep slope, there can be an impressive facade, as found in Lycian tombs, Petra, Ajanta and elsewhere.
excavated architecture
the upper part of the nave, choir, and transepts of a large church, containing a series of windows. It is clear of the roofs of the aisles and admits light to the central parts of the building.
clerestory
revolutionary style of Egyptian art created by Amenhotep IV, who took the name Akhenaton during his reign (1353–36 BCE) in the 18th dynasty. Akhenaton’s alteration of the artistic and religious life of ancient Egypt was drastic, if short-lived.
Akhenaton style
A movable, brightly colored cone or shaft of rubber that is used to signal something to be avoided, such as a hazard or work zone on a roadway.
pylon
in architecture, interior space whose roof rests on pillars or columns. The word means literally “under pillars,” and the design allows for the construction of large spaces—as in temples, palaces, or public buildings—without the need for arches. It was used extensively in ancient Egypt—where the Temple of Amon at Karnak provides a good example
hypostyle hall
a common element in construction, and one which is most often found in an excavation environment. In simple terms, it is any kind of wall that has been built with an intentional slope; the word ‘batter’ in this context is an architectural term that refers to a particular type of angle.
battered wall
the art and craft of building and fabricating in stone, clay, brick, or concrete block. Construction of poured concrete, reinforced or unreinforced, is often also considered masonry.
Masonry architecture
