Major Artistic Periods and Movements for Dummies Flashcards
1
Q
Prehistoric Art Period
A
Old Stone Age (hunting and gathering) and New Stone Age (agriculture)
- Paleolithic period - artists painted pictures of animals on cave walls and sculpted animal and human forms in stone.
- Shamanistic ritual to help them hunt.
- Even the act of painting was probably part of these rituals.
- Neolithic period - No art, but arthicecture
2
Q
Mesopotamian period
A
- Period covers several civilizations, each contributed different features to Mesopotamian culture
- The Sumerians
- The Akkadians
- The Assyrians
- The Babylonians
- Mesopotamian art is usually war art, propaganda art, or religious and tomb art.
- Mesopotamian art is often macho, but also refined, and sometimes comic and highly imaginative
3
Q
Egyptian period
A
- Art was made for the tomb.
- Style is symmetrical, rigid but elegant, for the most part unchanging, highly colorful, and symbolic.
- Artists used visual narrative, but stories were less dramatic and realistic than Mesopotamin
4
Q
Minoan period
A
- Minoan culture and art had a short life compared to Egyptian and Mesopotamian art.
- Minoan art is playful and focuses on life, sport, religious rituals, and daily pleasures.
- It is the first art to truly celebrate day-to-day life.
5
Q
Ancient Greek period
A
- Greek art is divided into:
- archaic (old-fashioned)
- classical periods
- moves increasingly toward realism.
- Invented techniques:
- Red-figure painting
- Contrapposto pose
- Perspective to allow artists to represent the world realistically.
- Idealized (made to look better than real life).
- Art of the classical period (when Greek art peaked) is known for its otherworldly calm and beauty.
6
Q
The Hellenistic Period
A
- Begins with Alexander the Great’s death
- Ends with Cleopatra’s snakebite suicide.
- It is Greek art stripped of much of its idealism (though not in all cases).
- Statues are still physically perfect, but instead of being imperturbably serene, they can express anger, bitter sorrow, or intense fear.
- Was the first time these emotions were dramatically and realistically portrayed in art.
7
Q
Etruscan period
A
- 8th century B.C.–4th century B.C.
- Etruria (modern-day Tuscany)
- Romans who conquered them built over most of their settlements, but didn’t disturb thier tombs.
- We know Etruscan life mainly through their tomb art
- surprisingly happy affair — death was pleasant continuation of life
8
Q
Roman period
A
- 300 B.C.– A.D. 476
- Copied Greeks but added something to the style.
- In architecture, the Romans contributed the Roman arch, an invention that helped them to build the biggest system of roads and aqueducts the world has ever seen.
- In painting and sculpture, the Romans took realism even farther than the Hellenistic Greeks. The busts of senators and early emperors look middle-aged, tough, and worldly.
9
Q
Byzantine period
A
- A.D. 500– A.D. 1453
- Byzantine art is Christian art of the Eastern Roman Empire after the fall of Rome in A.D. 476
- Byzantine art is a marriage of late Roman splendor, Greek artistic traditions, and Christian subject matter. Byzantine art is symbolic and less naturalistic than the Greek and Roman art that inspired it. It points to the hereafter rather than the here and now.
- Icons Painintgs and mosacics
10
Q
Islamic period
A
- 7th century–
- Mohammed condemned graven images, thus not many representations of humans in Islamic art.
- The Middle Eastern and North African countries that converted to Islam were also the guardians of the most sophisticated knowledge of mathematics and geometry. Some of this knowledge seems to have filtered into the artwork.
- Islamic artists often incorporate incredibly intricate and colorful patterns in carpets, manuscripts, ceramics, and architecture.
11
Q
Medieval period
A
- Mostly Christian art created in Europe after the fall of Rome and before the Renaissance.
- Steeped in mysticism and symbolism, with a focus on the Christian afterlife.
- Types:
- Stained-glass windows
- lluminated manuscripts
- Silver and golden reliquaries (elaborate containers for holy relics — bones and other body parts of saints)
- Architectural reliefs
- Romanesque
- Towering Gothic cathedrals.
12
Q
Renaissance period
A
- Renaissance means “rebirth.”
- Artists returned to classical models in painting, sculpture, and architecture.
- Portrait art
- Christian religious art still dominated, but the stories and images in the art tended to celebrate man and things of this world.
- Realism became as important as symbolism.
- Artists worked out the mathematical laws of perspective.
13
Q
High Renaissance
A
- Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael defined the movement known as the High Renaissance
- Stable, geometrically shaped compositions.
- Artists portrayed idealized subjects
14
Q
Mannerism
A
- After mastering nature, artists began to intentionally distort it.
- Artists elongated human figures, created contorted postures, and distorted landscapes, which were often charged with symbolism and erotic or spiritual energy.
- Art was no longer a window into an idealized version of the real world, but a window into the fruitful and fanciful imaginations of artists.
15
Q
Baroque period
A
- Developed during the Counter-Reformation (the 16th-century Catholic Church reform effort)
- Propaganda weapon in the religious wars between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 16th and 17th centuries.
- The Catholic Church wanted art to have a direct and powerful emotional appeal that would grab the attention of ordinary people and bind them to the Catholic faith.
- In Protestant lands, Baroque artists went out of their way to downplay the importance of saints, preferring more symbolic subjects for moral painting like landscapes charged with meaning, genre scenes (pictures of everyday events that read like fables), and paintings of fruit that suggest the temporariness of life on earth.
- Kings and princes also enlisted Baroque artists to celebrate their wealth and power.
