Artistic Movements

Question 1

Italian Renaissance

Answer 1

1350-1550
Artists: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Giotto, Donatello, Titian
Composers: Palestrina
Key writers: Petrach, Machiavelli
Key Ideas:
- individualism, humanism, secularism
- use of triangles as architecture of art
- individual portraiture
- landscapes
- freestanding human sculptures, nudes

Question 2

Northern Renaissance

Answer 2

1450-1700
Artists: Albrecht Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Rembrandt van Rijn
Writers: Cervantes, Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe
Key Ideas:
- centralization of power in nation-states
- reformation
- focus on common people in art
- more religious than Italian Renaissance

Question 3

Mannerism

Answer 3

1520-1600
Artists: Giorgione, Tintoretto, El Greco, Velazquez
Key Ideas:
- transition between end of Renaissance and beginning of the baroque era
- Art of Reformation and Counter-Reformation focused on new ideas and how to express them

Question 4

Baroque

Answer 4

1550-1750
Definition: overornamentation, curved lines, art that awed the viewer with impressive size and emotional reactions
Artists: Peter Paul Rubens, Nicholas Poussin
Writers: Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Hobbes, Locke, Vesalius, Harvey
Key Ideas:
- The Scientific Revolution, divine right absolution
- emergence of classical ballet and theater
- English Civil War

Question 5

Rococo

Answer 5

1710-1790
Definition: similar to baroque but more ornamental, less formal
Artists: Thomas Gainsborough, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Antoine Watteau, Êtienne Maurice Falconet
Writers: Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Burke, Goethe, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire
Key Ideas:
- Enlightened Despotism
- Enlightenment: salons, philosophes, encyclopedia

Question 6

Neoclassicism

Answer 6

1790-1820s
Definition: revival of styles and spirit of classic antiquity, reaction against Rococo
Artists: Jacques Louis David, Francisco Goya, Jean-Augste-Dominque Ingres, Jean-Antoine Houdon
Key Ideas:
- French Revolution
- Napoleonic Empire
- Nationalism emerged

Question 7

Romanticism

Answer 7

1820s-1860s
Definition: reaction to neoclassicism and the Industrial Revolution
Artists: Eugene Delacroix, John Constable, Joseph Turner, Théodore Géricault
Writers: Lord Byron, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Walter Scott
Key Ideas:
- expression of emotional nationalism and heroism
- glorified nature
- glorified the past, peasants, and nationalist movement

Question 8

Realism

Answer 8

Late 1850s-1870s
Definition: attempt to depict life as it really was, focus on the “common man,” reaction to Romanticism
Artists: Camille Corot, Jean-Francois Millet, Honore Daumier
Writers: Dickens, Nietzsche, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Emile Zola
Key Ideas
- focus on knowledge that can be known, or positivism
- realpolitik = turning away from emotion toward fact, rejection of industrial progress
- showed the ugliness of life for peasants
- called pornography

Question 8

Impresionism

Answer 8

1870s-1920s
Definition: a focus on capturing the momentary, transient effects of light and color, often emphasizing the portrayal of ordinary subjects in everyday settings
Artists: Cezanne, Monet, Degas, Cassat, Gaugin, Renoir, Pissaro, van Gogh
Key Ideas
- new subject matter, new way of looking at the world
- everyday life of the middle class became an acceptable subject for high art
- painting in the outdoors gave new chances to study the play of light

Question 8

Modernism & Post-modernism

Answer 8

20th century
Definition: artists were influenced by Freud, Einstein, wars, atomic age, and rise in modern media
Artists: Brancusi, Braque, Calder, Chagall, Lichtenstein, Picasso, Pollack, Warhol
Key Ideas
- Expressionism
- Abstractionism
- Cubism
- Futurism (Fascists)
- Surrealism
- Dadaism (revolt in response to WW1, against previous classical art movements)