| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Chronology | Dating of art – Before art historians can construct a history of art, they must be sure they know the date of each work. If researchers cannot determine a work's age, they cannot place it in its historical context. |
| Physical Evidence | Materials used at a known time, providing the latest possible dates – often reliably indicates an object's age |
| Documentary Evidence | Dated written document mentions the work – Helps pinpoint the date of work |
| Visual Evidence | Depicted style at a certain time such as: kind of hairstyle or clothing – Plays a significant role on dating artwork |
| Stylistic Evidence | Artist's distinctive manner of production – Most unreliable chronological criterion |
| Period Style | Characteristic artistic manner of a specific time within a distinctive culture such as: "Southern Song" in China |
| Regional Style | Variations in style tied to geography – Very often 2 artworks from the same place made centuries apart are more similar than contemporaneous works from 2 different regions |
| Personal Style | Distinctive manner of artists, often decisively explains stylistic discrepancies among works of the same time and place. Artist's personal style may change dramatically during a long career. Art historians then must distinguish among the different period styles of the artist |
| Genre | Paintings in which scenes of everyday life form the subject matter |
| Portraiture | Pictorial representation |
| Landscape | Depiction of a place |
| Still Life | Arrangement of inanimate objects |
| Iconography | "Writing of images" |
| Symbols | Images that stand for other images or ideas |
| Attributes | Personifications such as: scepter, headdress or costume that identifies a figure as a king |
| School | Group of artists working in the same style at the same time and place – The term connotes chronological, stylistic and geographic similarity |
| Patron | Person who supports with money, gifts, efforts, or endorsement an artist, writer, museum, cause, charity, institution, special event |
| Formal Analysis | Essential vocabulary consists of hundreds of words describing artworks of any time and place |
| Form | Object's shape and structure either in two dimensions or three |
| Composition | Refers to how an artist organizes forms in an artwork, either by placing changes on a flat surface or by arranging forms in space |
| Material | Such as pigment, clay, marble, gold and many more |
| Technique | Process artists employs, such as applying paint on silk |
| Line | One of the most important elements defining an artwork's or form, a line can be understood as the path of a point moving in space, an invisible line of sight or a visual axis |
| Color | Visual sensation when light is reflected off of a surface and seen by the eye |
| Texture | Quality of a surface such as rough or shiny |
| Space | Is the bounded or boundless "container" of objects |
| Carving | Subtractive technique – Final form is a reduction of the original mass |
| Additive | Technique in which materials are built up or added to create form |
| Subtractive | Technique in which materials are taken away from original mass - Carving |
| Relief Sculpture | Statues that exist independent of any architectural setting that a viewer can walk around – The subjects project from the background, but remain part of it |
| Sculpture In The Round | Freestanding figures, carved or modeled in three dimensions |
| Plan | A flat or two dimensional surface |
| Section | Blueprints – Diagram or representation of a part of a structure or building along an imaginary place that passes through vertically. Drawings showing a theoretical slice, or cross-section, across a structure's width are lateral sections. Those cutting through a building's length are longitudinal sections |
| Perspective | Device to create an illusion of depth or space on a two dimensional surface |
| Foreshortening | Use of perspective to represent apparent visual contraction of an object that extends back in space at an angle to the perpendicular plane of sight such as: the illusion that one part of the body is father away than another even though all the forms are on the same surface |
| Proportion | Relationship in terms of size of the parts of persons, buildings or objects |
| Hierarchy Of Scale | Artistic convention in which greater size indicates greater importance |
Combine with other sets
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