Master Vocab List Flashcards
Acropolis
Literally, “a high city”, a Greek temple complex built on a hill over a city.
Adobe
A building material made from earth, straw, or clay dried in the sun.
Agora
- A public plaza in a Greek city where commercial, religious, and societal activities are conducted.
- A public square or market place in a Roman city.
Amarna style
Art created during the reign of Akhenaton, which features a more relaxed figure style than in Old and Middle Kingdom art.
Amphiprostyle
Having four columns in the front and rear of a temple.
Amphora
A two-handled Greek storage jar.
Ankh
An Egyptian symbol of life.
Anthropomorphic
Having characteristics of the human form, although the form itself is not human.
Apadana
An audience hall in a Persian palace.
Apotropaic
Having the power to ward off evil or bad luck.
Arabesque
A flowing, intricate, and symmetrical pattern deriving from floral motifs.
Ashlar masonry
Carefully cut and grooved stones that support a building without the use of concrete or other kinds of masonry.
Athena
Greek goddess of war and wisdom; patron of Athens.
Atmospheric or Aerial Perspective
Landscapes that give the illusion of distance are done in this perspective.
Atrium
A courtyard in a Roman house or before a Christian church.
Axial plan
A building with an elongated ground plan.
Votive
Offered in fulfillment of a vow or pledge.
Stylized
A schematic, non-realistic manner of representing the visible world and its contents, abstracted from the way they appear in nature.
Hierarchy of scale
A system of representation that expresses a person’s importance by the size of his or her representation in a work of art.
Isocephalism
The tradition of depicting heads of figures on the same level.
In situ
A Latin expression that means that something is in its original location.
Spoila
The reuse of architectural or sculptural pieces in a building(s) generally different from their original location.
Canon
A body of rules or laws; in Greek art, the ideal mathematical proportion of a figure.
Contrapposto
A graceful arrangement of the body based on tilted shoulders and a bent knee.
Foreshortening
A visual effect in which an object is shortened and turned deeper into the picture plane to give the effect of receding in space.
Perspective
Depth and recession in a painting or a relief sculpture.
Linear perspective
Objects in this perspective achieve 3D in the two-dimensional world of the picture plane.
Orthogonals
All the lines within a linear perspective; draw the view back in space to the vanishing point.
Vanishing point
A common point within perspective (particularly linear perspective) drawings/paintings.
Stucco
A fine plaster used for wall decorations or molding.
Mosaic
A decoration using pieces of stone, marble, or colored glass, tesserae, called that are cemented to a wall or a floor (or another surface).
Kiln
An oven used for making pottery.
Terra-cotta
A hard ceramic clay used for building or making pottery.
Tufa
A porous rock similar to limestone.
Torons
Wooden beams projecting from the walls of adobe buildings.
Encaustic
An ancient method of painting that uses colored waxes burned into a wooden surface.
Fresco
A painting technique that involves applying water-based paint onto a freshly plastered wall. The paint forms a bond with the plaster that is durable and long-lasting.
Calligraphy
Decorative or beautiful handwriting.
Kufic
A highly ornamental Islamic script.
Tessellation
Decoration using polygonal shapes with no gaps.
Muqarna
A honeycomb-like decoration often applied in Islamic buildings to domes, niches, capitals, or vaults. The surface resembles intricate stalactites.
Cire perdue
The lost wax method.
Cong
A tubular object with a circular hole cut into a square-like cross section.
Lamassu
A colossal winged human-headed bull in Assyrian art.
Henge
A Neolithic monument, characterized by a circular ground plan. Used for rituals and marking astronomical events.
Menhir
A large uncut stone erected as a monument in the pre-historical era; a standing stone (ie. Stonehenge)
Stele
An upright stone lab used to mark a grave or a site.
Ziggurat
A pyramid-like building made of several stories that indent as the building gets taller; thus creating terraces at each level.
Necropolis
Literally, a “city of the dead”, a large burial area.
Cella
The main room of a temple where the God is housed.
Mastaba
Arabic for “bench”, a low, flat-roofed Egyptian tomb with sides sloping down to the ground.
Hypostyle
A hall in an Egyptian temple (and others) that has a roof supported by a dense thicket of columns.
Pylon
A monumental gateway to an Egyptian temple marked by two flat, sloping walls between which is a smaller entrance.
Sarcophagus
A stone coffin (ie. Sarcophagus of spouses).
Kore (Kouros)
An archaic Greek sculpture of a standing youth.
Krater
A large ancient Greek bowl used for mixing water and wine.
Panathenaic way
A ceremonial road for a procession built to honor Athena during a festival.
Shamanism
A religion in which good and evil are brought about by spirits which can be influenced by shamans, who have access to these spirits.
Cuneiform
A system of writing in which the strokes are formed in a wedge or arrowhead shape.
Hieroglyphics
Egyptian writing using symbols or pictures as characters.
Ka
The soul, or spiritual essence, of a human being that either ascends to heaven or can live in an Egyptian statue of itself.
Papyrus
A tall aquatic plant whose fiber is used as a writing surface in ancient Egypt.
Pharoah
A king of ancient Egypt
Gigantomachy
A mythical ancient Greek war between the giants and the Olympian gods.
Nike
Ancient Greek goddess of victory.
Niobe
The model of a grieving mother; after boasting of her twelve children, jealous gods killed them.
Peplos
A garment worn by women in ancient Greece, usually full length and tied at the waist.
