London Past Papers National Gallery Flashcards

Question

What is the name given to the smoky effect used by Leonardo da Vinci in ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’?

Answer 1

Leonardo achieves subtle transitions between light and shadow through another innovative technique, now known as 'sfumato' – from the verb 'turn to smoke'.

Answer 2

Paris This painting is one of a dozen views of the Gare Saint-Lazare that Monet painted in early 1877. He had known the station since his childhood, and it was also the terminal for trains to many of the key Impressionist sites west of Paris

Answer 3

'Bathers at Asnières' is an important transitional work. It shows him developing the application of his novel pointillist technique to a large work on the scale of History painting. Seurat is considered one of the most important Post-Impressionist painters.

Answer 4

(i) Photography/filming is permitted in exhibitions for personal non-commercial use, unless otherwise stated on the label by the exhibited work. (ii) Use of additional lighting or flash, tripods, and selfie sticks is not permitted

Answer 5

Giorgio Vasari The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Italian: Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori), often simply known as The Lives (Italian: Le Vite), is a series of artist biographies written by 16th-century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered "perhaps the most famous, and even today the most-read work of the older literature of art", "some of the Italian Renaissance's most influential writing on art", and "the first important book on art history".

Answer 6

Claude Gellée When Turner died in 1851, he left to the National Gallery Dido building Carthage and Sun rising through Vapour on condition that they were hung ‘always between the two pictures painted by Claude’, which he named as 'The Seaport' and 'The Mill'.

Answer 7

In 1914, Canadian suffragette Mary Richardson slashed the work with a meat cleaver to protest the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, a leader of the women's suffrage movement in Great Britain at the time.

Answer 8

The Fighting Temeraire World-famous spy 007 sits next to an unassuming man in the Gallery, in front of Turner's 'The Fighting Temeraire'. It is here that we see Q, played by Ben Whishaw, present Daniel Craig's Bond with plane tickets and a gun, ahead of his next mission.

Answer 9

The house on the left side of the painting belonged to a neighbour, Willy Lott, a tenant farmer, who was said to have been born in the house and never to have left it for more than four days in his lifetime.

Answer 10

Oil on oak

Answer 11

The Hay Wain

Answer 12

The wasps might provide a clue: vespe is the Italian for wasp, and Botticelli might have been making a pun on the name of the noble Florentine family, the Vespucci, who were patrons of his.

Answer 13

Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria. In this self portrait, Artemisia shows herself in the guise of the 4th-century martyr, Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Sentenced to death by the emperor Maxentius, Catherine was bound to revolving wheels studded with iron spikes.

Answer 14

The painting depicts the 98-gun HMS Temeraire, one of the last second-rate ships of the line to have played a role in the Battle of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames by a paddle-wheel steam tug in 1838, towards its final berth in Rotherhithe to be broken up for scrap.

Answer 15

Gesso, also known as "glue gesso" or "Italian gesso", is a white paint mixture used to coat rigid surfaces such as wooden painting panels or masonite as a permanent absorbent primer substrate for painting. It consists of a binder mixed with chalk, gypsum, pigment, or any combination of these. Alternative brief answer; Gesso a plaster-like layer covering a wooden panel, preparing it for painting

Answer 16

(i) Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) (ii) Michelangelo (1475–1564) (iii) Raphael (1483–1520) High Renaissance art, which flourished for about 35 years, from the early 1490s to 1527, when Rome was sacked by imperial troops, revolved around three towering figures: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Raphael (1483–1520).

Answer 17

The two cheetahs pulling the chariot may also be personal references. Bacchus' chariot is normally drawn by tigers or panthers, but Alfonso d'Este is known to have had a menagerie at the palace in which he kept a cheetah or a cheetah-like member of the cat family.

Answer 18

"The Lesser George". Like the Great George, the badge shows St George the Martyr on horseback slaying a dragon, but it is flatter and gold. In earlier times, the badge was worn from a ribbon tied around the neck. These days the badge is worn suspended from a small gold link from the riband at the right hip.

Answer 19

Art produced during the Middle Ages by the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire, spanning the fourth to the fifteenth century. The style is defined by devotional, Christian subjects depicted in angular forms with sharp contours, flattened colour and gold decoration. Byzantine art appeared in a wide range of art and design forms including painting, architecture, mosaic, metalwork and carved ivory relief, although it is most widely recognised for its lavish gold icons which still exist in churches around the world today.

Answer 20

Courtly painting created across Europe from the late 14th to the mid 15th centuries. Its distinguishing characteristics are a decorative stylisation combined with a rich use of colours and gold decoration. Often pictures which are categorised in this manner are spatially illogical, but include beautifully observed naturalistic details. It was principally practised at courts in France, Italy and Bohemia. Among its notable exponents are Giovanni di Paolo, Pisanello and Stefan Lochner. See the entry for Gothic.

Answer 21

Renaissance/14th to Early 16th Century Renaissance is the French word for rebirth and can be associated with the concern in Italy for recreating the achievements of Antiquity whose art was seen as supreme. Historians usually refer to two periods, the Early and the High Renaissance, the earlier period coinciding approximately with the 15th century. The term also applies generally to the more realistic style that was introduced by Masaccio and Donatello in Florence, and by extension, is sometimes used of works of the same period in Northern Europe, for example those of Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck in the Netherlands. Figures became weightier and more three-dimensional, and the space they occupied was more convincingly constructed.

Answer 22

Renaissance/14th to Early 16th Century Renaissance, meaning rebirth, was a 19th-century term applied by the German art historian Jakob Burckhardt to the culture of Italy from the 14th to 16th centuries - the equivalent of Vasari's 'rinascita' (rebirth). There is much disagreement about its precise definition. Generally speaking, the High Renaissance covers the later part of this period; in painting it is applied to the early decades of the 16th century, and in particular to the period which witnessed the ascendancy of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian.

Answer 23

Mannerism/ late16th Century Evolution of High Renaissance: Human form very detailed, showing musculature, posed in contorted, twisted, elongated postures Inspired by Michelangelo's work on Sistine Chapel ceiling

Answer 24

Baroque/17th Century In relation to painting and sculpture Baroque is used in a number of senses, but perhaps most usefully to describe large, usually 17th-century, works of a dramatic and exuberant nature which employ diagonal compositions and illusionistic effects in order to impress the viewer. The works of the Flemish painter Rubens and the Roman sculptor Bernini are often described as Baroque in this sense. The term was originally derogatory and may be derived from the Portuguese word barroco, meaning an irregular pearl.

Answer 25

The term Rococo is a style label applied particularly to the painting, interior decoration and architecture popular in France during the reign of Louis XV (1715 - 1774). It was initially applied in a derogatory manner by Neo-classicists of the late 18th century. The word may derive from the French rocaille which describes the embellishment of grottoes and fountains, and by implication suggests whimsical decoration. Rococo art is based on the study of natural forms; it is dominated by asymmetry, curved forms, and light bright colours.

Answer 26

Romantic is a descriptive word applied to art, literature and music, chiefly of the early 19th century, which share certain characteristics. These include spirited individuality, overt emotion, drama, and an affinity with the natural world. Artists in the Collection whose work at some time has been called Romantic include Delacroix, Turner, Constable, Gericault and Friedrich. Romanticism is contrasted with the various forms of Classicism.

Answer 27

Academic art refers to the art which was created in accordance with the doctrines of the official academies of painting that dominated much of the art world from the 17th to the 19th centuries. In these academies the merits of ancient art and the work of 'classical' painters such as Raphael and Poussin were extolled. Academic training was strictly controlled. It initially involved drawing after prints, then after sculptures, then the drawing of the live model. This was followed by compositional studies, leading to the ultimate goal of History painting.

Answer 28

The term, first used derisively, was derived from the title of a painting exhibited in 1874 by Monet, who exhibited the work independently of the official Salon in Paris along with artists such as Renoir, Cézanne and Pissarro. 'Impressionism' subsequently became widely used to describe the type of painting practised by this group of artists who exhibited together eight times up until 1886. They usually worked rapidly, in front of their subjects and often in the open air rather than in a studio, and took full advantage of the technical advances being made in the manufacture of artists' materials. Their characteristic broken or flickering brush work was particularly effective in capturing the fleeting quality of light. They tended to be attracted to similar subjects, namely aspects of modern urban life and landscapes.

Answer 29

Broadly speaking the term Post-Impressionism embraces the artists working in France in the 1880s, immediately after the Impressionists. It was coined by Roger Fry for his exhibition of 1910 in which he showed Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin and Seurat. The classification covers artists who were aware of Impressionism but who sought to move beyond it - the term is sometimes applied to late work of the original Impressionists. In the main, the post-Impressionist artists were less concerned with recording optically accurate appearances - as the Impressionists had been - than with the symbolic or expressive possibilities of representation.

Answer 30

The red clay to which gold leaf adheres on the surface of a painting

Answer 31

A two-part painting

Answer 32

A work painted into plaster either wet (true) or dry (secco)

Answer 33

The adding of gold to a painting in several different ways

Answer 34

A many-part altarpiece

Answer 35

The smoky blending of outlines to create a more three-dimensional effect of light and shadow

Answer 36

Painting over gold leaf and then scraping away some paint to reveal gold beneath

Answer 37

Paint made from the yolk of an egg mixed with powdered pigment

Answer 38

A three-part painting

Answer 39

A strong contrast of light and dark, creating a dramatic three- dimensional effect

Answer 40

(Post-Tridentine = after the Council of Trent) a series of meetings held by the Catholic church between 1545 and 1563 to discuss the doctrines and future of the Catholic Church in Europe

Answer 41

(Catholic Reformation) sometimes also called Baroque, the term used to describe the style of art to encourage folllowers back into the Catholic church in the early C17th

Answer 42

Similar to chiaroscuro, often even darker and with more shadow

Answer 43

To celebrate 200 years since the foundation of the National Gallery in 1824, a programme of inspirational exhibitions and outreach is happening around the country and around the world, under the banner NG200.

Answer 44

Margarito of Arezzo Aka Margarito d'Arezzo

Answer 45

Elizabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun

Answer 46

Vincent Van Gogh

Answer 47

John Constable

Answer 48

Artemesia Gentileschi

Answer 49

Diego Velazquez (Full name: Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez)

Answer 50

1491/2-9 and 1506-8

Answer 51

About 1638-9

Answer 52

About 1743

Answer 53

About 1762

Answer 54

Richard II presented to the Virgin and Child by his patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund

Answer 55

In the Uffizi Gallery in Florence Italy.